Circular Reasoning
by Swimdraconian
Summary: Torn from a hellish future, Harry awakens in his teenage body with a hefty debt on his soul. Juggling his violent past, Sidhe politics, and a questionable sanity, he fights to stay ahead of enemy intrigue. Desperation is the new anthem of violence.
1. Dogs of War

**Title:** Circular Reasoning

**Author:** Swimdraconian

**Rating:** M

**Genre:** Action/Adventure/Horror

**Pairing(s):** Harry/Fleur, Harry/Tonks, Harry/Maeve, Harry/OFCs

**Summary:** Ripped from a hellish future, Harry ends up in his teenage body with a hefty debt on his soul. Juggling his violent past, Sidhe politics, and a questionable sanity, he fights to stay ahead of enemy intrigue. Desperation is the new anthem of violence.

**Disclaimer:** Of course I own Harry Potter. Right about the time I became Prime Minister of several small countries. Mmm-hm. And if you believe that, I'll tell you another one…

Most of my monsters are property of Garth Nix and his brilliant _Abhorsen_ series as well as Jim Butcher's _Dresden Files_. And of course, there will be several Joss Whedon quotes, pop culture references, brief history lessons, political allusions, graphically violent scenes, potentially disturbing materials, and the severe debasement of JKR's world. If you are a canon fan, I highly suggest you hit the little red X in the corner of the screen, as this fic probably won't be to your tastes.

Most elements of Half-Blood Prince will not be used as I felt the book to be too constrictive for where I wanted to go with this story. Seventh book? What seventh book? If you recognize any of the material used here and I haven't cited an outside source, please let me know. I've read so much over years that I sometimes struggle to remember who or where I've drawn my inspiration. I would like to give credit where credit is due.

This is not a harem fic. I listed the pairings so nobody will be surprised when they pop up. CR!Harry is a serial monogamist. Only one lady at a time.

Bear with me, because I feel this needs to be repeated. As you've probably come across my work before, maybe from other fandoms, maybe even from my early _X-Files_ days, then you know by now that I write a very dark flavour of fiction. There will be scenes here that are potentially disturbing, including, but not limited to: gore, torture, rape, PTSD, various psychosis, and brief, _very, **very**_ brief mentions of necrophilia.

You can take the geek out of the grimdark!fic, but you can't take the grimdark!fic out of the geek.

The only thing I own here is the right to fuck with your brain as much as I possibly can.

**Author's Notes:** So I took lnky's advice…

And decided that a full on rewrite of the first three chapters was in order. I've gone through, weeded out all of the extraneous clichés and then lampshaded the rest. Who knows? Maybe I can breathe some new life into old tropes.

A thank you goes to all of the crazy fucks at DLP who have inspired me to do better than my initial efforts. Cheers, people. An _exceptionally_ big thank-you-for-saving-my-sorry-ass goes to Andro for all of his sweat, blood and tears that went into editing this behemoth. Thanks man, I'd have been lost without your wit and encouragement. A shout-out also goes to Oz, my newest beta and Grammar God.

* * *

**Circular Reasoning**

Prologue

Dogs of War

_**At the bottom, you see, we are not Homo-sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. -Stephen King**_

**Jan 9, 2008 **

**T: 1359 hours**

Harry hit the warehouse door running.

His feet pounded the pavement, thighs burning with exertion. Blood ran sluggishly down the side of his face from the gash on his head. His ribs were broken too, steel bands of pain snapped tight around his lungs. Spellfire splashed off of the rubble piled around the burnt out ruins of what was once a department store, the triumphant howl of the Death Eaters rising in volume.

Black robes fluttered in his peripherals.

Harry cursed under his breath.

Half-melted steel rebar lay twisted amongst the broken concrete like a cage of bones, waiting to catch the unwary in its grasp. Harry staggered over the debris, gracelessly ploughing through the slick puddles of oil and waste hidden in the gloom. Hewn stone heavily deformed from their original structure bit at his shins. His foot caught on a hidden length of jagged steel and Harry went sprawling across the pavement, his right knee striking the ground with a sharp crack reminiscent of a gunshot.

The Death Eaters jeered, mocking his flight from them, their raucous laughter ringing in his ears.

He lay panting against the ground, the coppery tang of blood sitting thick and salty on the back of his tongue.

He snarled, rage and fear warring for dominance within him. His breath stopped short in his throat, pain cutting off his air, cutting off his ability to think. Darkness swept over him. The voices of his pursuers rattled in his skull, far too close for comfort and a reedy thread of panic shrilled within him. Harry clawed his way back to consciousness.

Green light struck the ground behind him.

Harry hauled himself to his feet, leaving a deep smear of blood on the tarmac beneath him, leg nearly giving way under his weight. He stumbled over a pile of broken marble and glass, the expensive remains of a long vandalized Muggle law firm crunching under his boots. Spots danced in his vision as the street briefly swirled out of focus. There was the rumble of falling stone from the blasting curses aimed at the ruins towering over him and Harry knew he didn't have long to work.

He bared bloodstained teeth in a grin and aimed his wand at the crumbling building. Steel screamed on glass in protest as the animation twisted itself into a hulking monster. Shining claws of steel and thick glass spread and curled as Harry's warped creation crouched low to the ground, violet fire burning in its eyes, its form animated by an unholy hunger for flesh.

The sounds of pain and fear followed Harry down the alleyway as the creature pounced on the unsuspecting Death Eaters.

"Surprise, surprise, assholes," said Harry, voice rasping and damn near ruined. He laughed, limping steadily away from the growing carnage.

* * *

There are a thousand different ways in which things could have gone wrong. And each one of them hinge directly on the summer after his fifth year. Oddly enough, it's the smallest fucking details that change things.

Harry's not stupid. Lazy, maybe, and unmotivated to succeed in his classes, especially when he couldn't see the fucking usefulness of transfiguring a beetle into a button, but definitely not stupid. He understands the idea of alternative time-lines and the 'what ifs' of alternate universes. Because really, when he thinks about it, the possibilities are endless. A thousand different choices for a thousand different situations in a thousand different realities – his over-active imagination often leads him to escapism. But it doesn't necessarily mean they're any better than reality.

In one version, Dumbledore dies at the end of Harry's sixth year. Snape kills him. Grand conspiracies all around. Voldemort and his posse of Death Eaters invade the castle, the Order barely holding them off. Harry spends his seventh year tromping around the countryside with his friends looking for artefacts that can kill Voldemort. They do. Good triumphs over evil with a healthy dose of luck. Happy endings for everyone. Harry marries his best mate's little sister, becomes Head of the Auror Department, has two point five kids, and spends the rest of his life as a glorified housewife. But this isn't what happens.

In another, Voldemort is quicker on the draw. He seizes Harry in the beginning of his sixth year along with a handful of his friends. Harry watches them get tortured to death. His sanity is a tentative thing at this point. A chancy combination of luck and opportunity later, Harry steals a wand and takes Voldemort out along with himself. Neither end up living after the other dies. Lucius Malfoy rises to power as the new Dark Lord. But this isn't what happens.

Another time-line has Harry performing numerous rituals of dubious quality. He gains power, becoming a Light Lord in opposition to Voldemort. The ministry encourages this. He becomes their poster boy. Scrimgeour is pleased. Hundreds flock to Harry's call. Dumbledore doesn't agree with this course of action and Harry wrests control of the Order from him. Dumbledore is killed a week later, taking most of Voldemort's inner circle with him. Harry fights Voldemort and wins. The first order of action he takes as presiding Light Lord of England is demanding that the Ministry execute all Death Eaters, Death Eater families, and Death Eater sympathisers. They do. The mob wants blood. Slytherin House is emptied. A reign of McCarthyism like none other sweeps the country. No one is safe. England is a miserable place to be. But this isn't what happens.

Or: Voldemort makes him an offer. Tom Riddle was a never stupid man and he recognizes early on the futility of continuing the war. Harry's life, his friends' lives and everyone else's in exchange for Harry's loyalty. He takes it. Voldemort reigns unopposed. Oddly enough, the wizarding world flourishes. Well, the pureblood population does. Harry becomes Voldemort's most devoted, most vicious Death Eater. Sixteen years, five hundred and forty-eight wizards, two hundred and six Muggles, and eighty-nine magical creatures later, his best friend fires a killing curse at his back. Funny, he hadn't thought Hermione was that angry over being banished to the Muggle world. For her, it's a bit like putting down a rabid dog. Her tears dried up a long time beforehand. But this isn't what happens.

In one particularly morbid version, the war never ensues. In this daydream, Harry is cut off from everyone else for most of the summer. No friends to talk to as it's again, too much of a security risk. No Dursley's to talk to because Harry may be desperate, but he's not masochistic. The isolation on top of Sirius' death and the pressure from the prophecy takes its toll. And a few weeks into the school year, Harry gives up. He's a kid. Voldemort is not. There is no feasible way for Harry to defeat the most powerful dark lord of the century, not with luck and wishful thinking – which aren't much better options than the _power of love_ shtick Dumbledore keeps shoving down his throat. The way Harry figures it: he's been living on borrowed time all along. Let the wizarding world clean up their own messes for once. The next morning, Ron Weasley finds his best friend sprawled in the bottom of the shower stalls. A tiny crystal vial clenched in hand, bead of poison still clinging to the wry curl of Harry's mouth; that mocking Mona Lisa smile will be plastered all over every wizarding publication in the UK. Voldemort's takeover four months later is swift and silent and for the next three hundred years, he rules with an iron fist over the wizarding world.

But this isn't what happens.

Reality is far different than anything he could have imagined.

There is no warning. No frogs falling from the sky, no sheets of fire raining down, no water turning to blood. The sky doesn't darken. People don't chant the name of the Beast. Hell doesn't give any sign that it's come to earth.

This is what happens: slowly and surely, Harry gets in _way_ over his head.

And then things snowball.

Really, _really_ fast.

The summer after his fifth year, he does embrace the cry for blood. Retaliation is too kind of a description. Vengeance, bloody and excessive, is a little closer to the truth.

It starts out small, him listening in on Order conversations and Auror tips. He picks off the stragglers; Death Eaters from the lower fringes of Voldemort's enclave. Harry is addicted almost immediately. The power is too much. He spends most of his sixth year in a haze of red, wandering dazedly to his classes like a junkie in need of a fix. That is, when he remembers to attend them.

The siren call of dark magic stirs something deep in his blood. It's difficult to resist. He finds himself compelled to kill in order to satisfy the bloodlust. The craving goes bone-deep and his hands shake if he tries to go more than twenty-four hours without a kill.

Voldemort notices. Dumbledore notices. The Ministry notices.

Harry sends Voldemort's emissary back with his intestines wrapped around his neck. He snubs Dumbledore's attempts at reconciliation. He can't, however, ignore the Ministry. They make him an offer too: join us or join the ranks of Azkaban. It's a long awaited wake-up call.

At the age of seventeen, Harry is recruited by a heavily militarised division of the Department of Mysteries after a yearlong bender on the darkside. Shorner, the man in charge of the program, strips away the mindset of a serial-killer and replaces it with that of a soldier. Harry becomes a glorified one-man assassination team; the golden boy of the DoM's Special Forces with the Ministry holding the other end of his leash. Shorner says this is an improvement, gives him some bullshit about having direction in his life now. Harry never bothers to tell Shorner that the conditioning didn't take as well as he hoped. Harry the Murderer is never far from the surface of Harry the Soldier. They overlap enough that his killer instinct is content to subordinate itself to orders.

Harry never finishes his seventh year at Hogwarts. The war picks up momentum too fast. Truth be told though, he was involved long before the age of seventeen. It doesn't prepare him any better for what's to come.

He isn't bothered by his incomplete education. Instead his time is taken up raking up a steadily rising headcount. Sure, it's murder – it's what he's good at. Harry gains a reputation as one of the most powerful sorcerers of dark magic England has produced in the last one hundred years. The Ministry doesn't have a problem with this so long as Harry is in their pocket. And Harry doesn't have a problem with the Ministry holding the reins right up until Scrimgeour goes mad.

The ex-Head of the Auror Department and recently elected Minister declares a state of emergency and pushes a bill through the Wizengamot that makes his word absolute. See, Scrimgeour has a little problem with power too. He gets paranoid when it gets threatened. And apparently, publicly protesting the restriction and registration of those buying wands is enough to make being Muggleborn a criminal offence.

Three years after Scrimgeour gains his position, Harry loses Hermione to the Muggleborn concentration camps at the age of nineteen.

Understandably, he goes a little crazy.

It takes Scrimgeour hours to die. Harry covers his tracks carefully and when announced, the official cause of death is drowning. Harry finds this funny. Scrimgeour _did_ drown. Scrimgeour drowned in his own blood. It's got to be the first time the Ministry has ever told something even vaguely related to the truth. Nobody can connect him to the murder, but everyone knows he's behind it.

The Ministry isn't very happy with him being off his leash, but it's too late now. Four months after Harry kills Scrimgeour, the Ministry falls to Voldemort. The Muggle government collapses hours afterwards. In a roundabout sort of way, Harry could be single-handedly blamed for the demise of both.

Ironically, this facilitates Harry's reunion with Dumbledore as a mentor. For a brief period of time, Harry is at peace despite the utter chaos of the world around him. Hogwarts becomes the last bastion of Britain against Voldemort. Those that can, flee from the UK. They join the exodus from Europe, as war is plaguing the mainland as well. The world feels a lot emptier to Harry.

When Harry is twenty-years-old, a Death Eater slips into Hogwarts under the guise of a student and murders Dumbledore in front of seven hundred other witnesses in the Great Hall. Before Harry can take him down, the Death Eater blows his own head off, that manic smile erupting in a shower of teeth. On the night of Dumbledore's death, Voldemort and his entire army storms Hogwarts. The old castle falls. Less than forty people make it out alive, Harry himself included. After that, the slope downhill gets steeper.

One of Voldemort's old allies, a high necromancer from the wizarding slums of Brazil, gives Harry almost more trouble than Voldemort ever will. Inferi counts rise by the hundreds. It's a little difficult to destroy the Inferi considering that most of them are friends and family. It's the most demoralizing tactic Voldemort can think of and it works. Spectacularly.

A few months after Harry turns twenty-one, Voldemort and a French wizard creatively titling himself 'La Croix' take over most of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Seeing this, Ron, one of Harry's last surviving friends, does the stupidest thing he can think of: He gathers a rag-tag army of ex-Aurors, hit-wizards, bright-eyed idealists, and other pathetic individuals to fight Voldemort back. Ron and his band of merry men line up on foreign soil to fight for the light and the oppressed. Ron is not as much of a chessmaster as he would like to believe. Ron misjudges Voldemort's tactics. It's a massacre on both sides. From what Harry hears of it, the fields ran red with blood.

Sadly, this is Ron's last hurrah; the youngest Weasley male himself takes out Lucius Malfoy and a number of his French relatives before being struck in the back of his head by a stray curse. On the upside, this solidifies Draco's position on the side opposing Voldemort.

During Normandy's Folly, Harry is in Japan finishing off the council of Dark wizards terrorizing the chains of Asian Islands dotting the Pacific. He has no knowledge of the happenings of Northern Europe. Upon his return to England, Harry receives the news of Ron's death and an oath of loyalty from the many-times-reformed Draco Malfoy.

Harry kills the necromancer's apprentice at twenty-two. It doesn't make him feel any better. Harry kills off most of Voldemort's inner circle and nearly La Croix himself. It's a temporary improvement on the situation.

The Muggle and Magical Ministries of Great Britain are only the first to collapse.

One morning when Harry is twenty-five, he wakes up and there is no wizarding world. Globally. It's a sobering reminder of just how fucked everything has become.

The Order of the Phoenix is hamstrung after the death of Dumbledore. With all that Harry has been involved in, the Order is little inclined to make him a member let alone listen to his suggestions. As such, the resistance is without a competent leader until Amelia Bones takes over and brings with her the last of the Aurors and Ministry Intelligence. A semblance of order is restored and Harry is drafted into being part of a collective leadership. For someone who was almost convicted of over forty-seven cases of premeditated murder, it's a big step up. With Madam Bones in charge, the gathered resistance and its refugees move underground.

The funny thing is that for all of his efforts, he never gets a chance to kill Bellatrix Lestrange – the one who inadvertently drove him down this path in the first place. She dies in an Auror-led ambush four weeks after the anniversary of Dumbledore's death when Harry is twenty-six.

London is a ghost town. The rest of England isn't much better. At almost twenty-eight years old, this is not where he had imagined himself ending up.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 0800 hours**

There were no sunrises this far below ground.

The bunker was a relic from WWII. Modern amenities had been added to it along with medical facilities, housing, a refectory, and a school. Harry had thought about nicknaming the place Fort Kaboom in fit of morbid parody, but decided it was a little too glib in the face of so many other people's pain and loss. Others had tried to make the place into a tiny model of the wizarding world, shops in the narrow corridors bartering food, drugs and scavenged goods from topside, little communities springing up alongside the shops. But as the death toll grew higher, there became no disguising what the bunker really was – a box made of concrete and steel and if it ever got out that this was the last stronghold of the wizarding world, it would serve just as well as a tomb.

The bunker was just the bunker and it was home to the remnants of England's Wizarding inhabitants.

Harry prowled down the corridor off of his bunk, letting the heavy steel door slam behind him. The corridor was so narrow that at the widest part Harry could place his palms on both walls of the tiny hallway and exert enough pressure to lift his weight from the ground. Lights mounted high over his head buzzed erratically, concrete marred with lurid graffiti flickering in and out of view.

The lights looked like shit and washed everything out with a pale, greenish glow, but they were there and Harry couldn't complain too much about them without feeling guilty. Electricity was a luxury these days; most of it having been routed to London from a heavily warded plant in Leeds before it was destroyed last year in a Death Eater raid. Now, the only source of energy left came from the generator room adjacent to Wing B, the steady lub-lub of their motors thrumming underfoot.

Harry never minded the noise from the generator room. The walls were solid and thick and the hum of the machines was a thousand times preferable to the sound of gunfire or mortar rounds or the explosions from enemy spells.

He wasn't the only one stationed in Wing B, or at least, he wasn't _always_ the only one. Simple doorways ran along the length of the hallway. Rooms bare of occupants and belongings, they looked like deep-set eyes, bruised, hollow, and hungry. Four years ago, these rooms had been full; now, the only ones here were Harry and Harry's memories and the cold, dank scent of mould. The silence had manifested its own presence, a stillness that lingered and reached out for the unwary, provoking nightmares that left him sweating the sheets translucent and screaming his way back to wakefulness.

Harry emerged from the narrow corridor into the refectory. It was unusually crowded this morning; despite better efforts to promote cleanliness, the place still stank of burnt food and ammonia. Cleaning charms were no substitute for good, old-fashioned soap and water – especially not when most of the Muggles hiding here still flinched whenever a wand was pointed their direction.

Fear was not the most appetizing scent in the morning.

Long tables stretched from one end of the refectory to the other, looking like a rather paltry imitation of Hogwarts' Great Hall. There was a bunch of haggard Muggle survivors clustered together in the far corner of the refectory away from their Wizarding counterparts. Seemingly as one, they looked up and followed Harry with their gazes. It was like watching pack behaviour in a group of wild animals.

Harry knew that he made them uncomfortable. To them, Harry was the right hand of the Devil himself. Voldemort may have been the one to start the war in the first place, but he was just another villain darting through the shadows, a story told to naughty children to make them behave.

They'd witnessed firsthand Harry dragging bloody and half-dead Death Eaters into the vacant rooms lining Wing B. Heard the screams, the curses, the pleadings for mercy, and watched Harry drag bloody and fully-dead corpses back out.

People looked at him differently after that. Muttered harsh things in the corridors, whispering to each other: why hadn't Harry gone after Voldemort yet? Did he think this war was just a game?

Harry hated to disappoint, but Tom Riddle wasn't even in Great Britain and hadn't been for almost two years. By the time he'd found out, it was too late to go after Voldemort and a nigh impenetrable magical blockade had been erected around the U.K. Apparently the European wizards hoped that all of Great Britain's problems would simply starve and die off. Nothing got in and nothing got out – as if that could actually contain the war that seemed to spread like a disease amongst the wizarding world. The war had become a blood agent; corroding the veins the heart pumped it through, making as many return trips as necessary before withering everything into a devastated husk.

He elbowed his way into the crush of dirty people at the counter and snagged a bowl of the same hot mush they'd been serving for the past three weeks. Harry stirred the unappetizing slop with his spoon and watched as it dripped off the utensil in sticky grey lumps.

He ate it anyway.

Food went to mouth, then chew, swallow, and repeat until bowl was empty.

Just another fucking day in paradise.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 0943 hours**

Roofing tar burned like dry firewood in the middle of the Sahara. Somewhere up ahead, there was a series of gutted office buildings with their upper floors burning like mammoth-sized matches. Smoke hung in the air, hazy and stinking of petroleum, burnt plastic, industrial chemicals, and other dead decomposing shit.

In early 2004, the tension building between Muggles and wizards snapped spectacularly. Some lunatic nutjob had found the remnants of the Wizarding Ministry and had decided to blow the place to kingdom come. Well, what they _thought_ were the remains of the Wizarding Ministry – not like _anybody_ could find the damn thing anymore, not after the Ministry fell, but Harry had to give credit where credit was due. One small step for man, one wholesale slaughter for mankind. London burned like a tinderbox. Bodies piled up in the streets. And between the Muggles and the wizards, most of southern England was destroyed.

Harry never would have chosen London to make a stand; too many buildings, too many people, and far too much that could go wrong. But wizards had stupidly herded the conflict further and further south until _nobody_ had room to move.

Misty rainfall cut the ash from the cold morning air, the chill bite of sleet in the air hinting at a further drop in temperature. Soggy trash squished beneath Harry's boots as he waved his team forward.

They fanned outward, dark, wet figures leapfrogging the shadows of the ruins, a wary, nervous tension agitating the air around them.

Increased Death Eater activity had been reported in this area, which was odd, because this sector was run by a rather fanatical group of Muggle extremists. A self-formed militia, these were probably the very same people responsible for the fires that burned out of control. Not every Muggle was amenable to magical help during an apocalypse, especially when it was magic that created it in the first place. Global warming never stood a chance when all the wizarding world had to do was fart and then the world as everyone knew it was over. The conspiracy theorists never saw it coming.

"We've picked up a tail," Neil muttered beside Harry, rainwater dripping from his chin, face smeared in the same heavy black and grey greasepaint as Harry's.

"I know. Been behind us for the last fifteen minutes." Harry glanced at the ex-Auror out of the corner of his eye. "Do you want to take point or shall I?"

Neil grimaced as he stepped over someone's pitiful attempt at a barrier made of cement blocks, a pile of old shopping trolleys and a burnt out police vehicle. "I'll take point. This next sector is a dead zone and they like jumping us from behind. Better for you to take them on than me."

"Your concern for my welfare is touching, but misplaced," Harry drawled, not bothering to hide his amusement. Faint movement in the darkened innards of the building behind them told Harry that there was more than one person following them.

An uncomfortable smile flickered across Neil's face before the ex-Auror moved up ahead. Too many times of Harry being the only survivor made people leery of him. Or at least, _leery_ of being _around_ him. It was a constant: fire was hot, Weasleys had red hair, and being around Harry killed faster than a suicide wish or a Killing Curse.

Harry's team slipped to the left of an extensive pile-up, passing each other in short jumps as they moved point to point behind abandoned cars and sooty building rubble. Cooled metal formed a puddle around the wheels of the wreckage, a red-orange glow from under the engine telling Harry that its insides were still hot. Up ahead, the tarmac crumbled into pieces, large slabs of road buckled and broken, slip sliding on each other like puzzle pieces. Almost every inch of available surface was covered in garbage and graffiti.

Slogans in bright orange declared hatred to the world while obscene pictures in lime green, putrid purple, piss yellow and dirty white showed images of oversized phalluses, distorted women, and rude gestures. Names and gang symbols were splattered beside quoted scripture about sin and Hell and the nature of man and war.

There was a new addition since Harry had last patrolled here. Sprayed in giant red letters across the side of a building were the words:

_The whore and gambler, by the state_

_Licensed, build that nation's fate._

_The harlot's cry from street to street_

_Shall weave old England's winding-sheet._

_The winner's shout, the loser's curse,_

_Dance before dead England's hearse._

"You know, I always liked Shakespearean soliloquies better than Blake's condescending bullshit," Harper, Harry's second-in-command, mused idly as he closed in behind him. "At least Shakespeare was upfront about being a pretentious prick."

Caleb Harper was the exception to the rule. Short and whipcord lean with dark wispy hair and pale silver eyes, Harper was as crazy as they came. Luna's four times removed cousin had taken to following Harry around like a little deranged puppy after the fall of Hogwarts and the collapse of the Ministry. Something about being half-carried, half-dragged out of a burning building turned Harper from a stand-offish Slytherin into a close friend of Harry's and a bat-shit insane disciple of the Tao of Kill 'Em All And Let God Sort Out The Rest. His unwavering faith was a morbid comfort to Harry.

"What would you have said instead?" Harry murmured, noting that there were now three people following them. Muggles might not have magical signatures, but they sure as hell showed up bright and clear on Harry's personal radar. Felt like bugs crawling over his skin – irritating and hard to ignore.

Harper chuckled under his breath. "How about… _Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once. Of all the wonders that I have yet heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it come._"

"Fascinating," Harry replied, loosening his swords in their sheaths, making sure that the chilly rain hadn't seeped in and frozen within their lacquered scabbards belted to his waist.

Sturdy and made of high-grade steel, the Japanese longsword and wakizashi were trophies he'd taken off a dead dark wizard in the Asian Islands. They weren't his first choice of weapons, but they were well-made to endure most any type of hell Harry put them through and a blade to the kidneys was one of his _favourite_ ways of ending a close-combat magical duel.

They were also one of the few artefacts in the world that could kill undead flesh as easily as they cleaved living meat from bone. Harry always appreciated an exceptionally useful tool.

There was a tickle of energy in the area that stank of rotting meat to Harry's senses. Besides the three Muggles stalking them, someone had let loose an Inferi nearby. "You would embrace death with open arms then?" Harry continued. "Seems to me like you've spent most of this time running from it."

Harper's eyes flicked over the crumbling buildings. "And you haven't?"

Harry smiled. It wasn't a nice one. "_Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Almighty had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter…_"

"Hamlet." Harper made a soft, rude sound of disgust. "That's unusually passive-aggressive for you."

The static bite of a dead zone loomed up ahead. "That's called being realistic." Harry whistled sharply and caught Neil's eye. The man nodded and the rest of Harry's team melted into the ruins of the neighbouring buildings. Harry followed Harper up a teetering pile of block and steel until they were about level with the building's second floor and hid themselves in the rubble. Everyone on his team had smeared thick stripes of grey and black greasepaint across any exposed skin; combined with their dark robes, black BDUs, and thick dragonhide armour, it was hard to pick them out of their surroundings – even up close.

Harper stretched out against a flat slab of stone, a rapidly assembled Black Arrow perched in front of him. "Okay Potter, what am I shooting at?"

Harry pulled out a pair of binoculars from his pack and peered past the badly hidden Muggles. "Inferi at ten o'clock coming around that brick building to your left."

"Which brick building to my left, there's three of them," Harper muttered irritably. "And three Muggles for that matter. Where the fuck did they come from?"

The side of Harry's mouth quirked into a crooked smile. "Go for the building with the troll-sized dick painted on it."

Harper snorted. "Again I ask which bloody building?"

"It's cotton-candy pink with mutated boils," Harry drawled. "Pretty hard to miss."

The younger man adjusted the settings on his scope. "Found your zombie… _wait_… oh shit!" he breathed. Harper jerked back, blinking in disbelief. "… You might want to take a look at this."

Harry peered once more through the binoculars, nearly biting his tongue in shock as he belatedly recognized Cornelius Fudge's pallid, decaying features. The corpse staggered slack-jawed through the trash in the streets, eyes white and filmy, blood and other unmentionable things streaked over his naked flesh.

"Well would you look at that," Harper said, as he squinted through the optic sights on the sniper rifle. "Fudge fudged himself."

Harry, who had a better view of the ex-Minister's flabby, shit-smeared buttocks than he ever wanted, nodded sagely. "That fudging fudger."

Harper's sound of amusement was lost against the chuff of the Black Arrow's silencer. The ex-Minister's head exploded like an over-ripe melon, bits of brain matter and brackish blood spraying the street, headless body jerking erratically on the ground.

"One down, three to go," Harry muttered, shifting his position.

The younger man sighed and began disassembling the sniper rifle. "Let's not kill the Muggles until we know whether or not they're just making up bogeymen for us."

"And if there really are Death Eaters in the area?" Harry replied calmly as he tucked away his binoculars. "You want to take the chance that they're stalking the Muggles for more Inferi fodder?"

"No," Harper said slowly, giving Harry a wary look. "We need facts and I hate to admit it, but the Muggles hold all of the cards here. Corpses can't answer questions, Harry."

Harry raised an eyebrow at Harper's sudden about-face on killing. "Be easier to just gank them now, than to worry about the possibilities later," he replied as he signalled to the rest of the team and slipped from his hiding place.

"If that happens, then I guess I'll get a chance to shoot a lot more than just Muggles," Harper said, following him through the rubble as they reconvened with the rest of the team. "Besides, you'll sense the Death Eaters long before they'll get here. That's enough of a warning for me."

Harry smiled. "It's creepy how well you know me."

The three Muggles had joined up with four more and this started to feel more like a badly planned trap than a routine patrol. Harry's team hid in the shadows of what was formerly a tall office building. "If I remember correctly, there is an open exit on the other side of this building," Harry murmured to Neil. "I want you to take half and go round the other side; I have a hunch that they're going to pin us in against the dead zone. If you get there first, we can drive them into the dead zone – most of them are helpless in there. But be careful, there are downed wires on the other street."

Neil nodded, never questioning Harry's judgement. "Will do."

"And if you see Death Eaters, scatter and hide. Do not engage them," Harry finished. "Fenrir's come back to London. I wouldn't put it past him to start preying on our patrols again."

Neil saluted and Harry had to smile at the ingrained habit. The ex-Auror grinned and hustled his half of the team through the building's debris and out of sight, boot steps splashing in the rainwater flooding through the wrecked carport. Harry hoped like hell that it wouldn't be the last he saw of them.

Harry's second-in-command snorted in disgust. "You know what I don't get? Inferi don't like dead zones. There's no magic, no food, no draw for them to be here. Dead zones are like the anti-magic equivalent of zombie roach motels," Harper said as he followed Harry and the three remaining teammates back out into the rain.

"Your point being?" Harry replied.

Magic liked to fritz out in dead zones, which was probably why Muggles liked them so much – it tended to even the odds a bit. This close to a dead zone meant that magic had a fifty-fifty chance of fucking up. But if anybody could find a way around that, it'd be Jonesy.

Harry nodded to Jake Jones, Lee Jordon's older half-brother who clocked in at 6'7" and well over fifteen stone. Jones was their heavy hitter, their ace in the hole. The man had learned magic at the knee of his Jamaican grandmother and his bag of tricks held several very _nasty_ surprises. Not to mention that at his size, he could just as easily overwhelm his opponents physically as he could magically.

Jones grinned, a flash of white teeth in his chocolate-coloured face, and jokingly saluted Harry. He scattered a handful of red dust into the air, ruby flakes settling to the ground in a semi-circle. It glittered amongst the trash for a moment then vanished like a snake slithering through tall grass.

It didn't work. Shit.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but magic was unreliable.

"Someone deliberately released Fudge here." Harper knelt behind a high pile of rubble and swept the Mossberg from his shoulder, the wood on its pump-action grip dull and worn from constant use; it was probably some poor, long-dead bastard's duck hunting gun liberated for more desperate uses. He braced the stock over his knee and began to load the Mossberg, then turned to look at Harry. There was a light dawning in Harper's eyes that Harry didn't like the look of. "But you already knew that, didn't you?"

Harper shook his head and continued packing rounds into the barrel. "Might help if you shared these things with us from time to time. Cut down on how many people end up dead, you know what I'm saying?"

Jones turned his head around slowly to stare at Harper, his features emptying of mirth. "The hell are you talking about?" he said, glancing back at Harry. "What the _hell_ are you talking about?" he repeated.

Harry cut in before Jones could continue that particular train of thought. "Last time I checked, Harp, you didn't mind the body-count. In fact, I seem to remember you egging me on more often than not," Harry replied, irritation bleeding through his words despite the tight hold he had on his temper. "Or did you decide to conveniently forget that little detail?"

The last two members of Harry's team were of average power and skill. He hadn't even bothered to learn their names – they'd end up dead soon enough. Harry directed the smaller of the two towards the building behind them. The stairs were still intact and if he could get his back-up to pick off stragglers from overhead, it would greatly even the odds.

"I'm not complaining about the body-count on their side," said Harper flatly. "However, I am more than a little concerned about the one on _our_ side. How long was that Inferi following us? I mean, were you ever going to share that with the rest of the team if it hadn't been _convenient_ for you?"

Dead zones had this wonderful effect of balancing the scales. Magic didn't work inside them and neither did technology. In fact, opponents were pretty limited in their artillery – fighting with sticks and stones tended to have a humbling effect on people.

And if they weren't posted so close to incoming danger on both sides, Harry would have punched Caleb Harper on sheer principle alone.

Harry laughed, teeth gritting together too hard for there to be any humour in it. "Now, Harper? You have to have this discussion _right now_? 'Cause it's _really_ not a good time for this."

Harper finished loading the Mossberg and chambered a round, his movements quick, almost jittery. "Really, Harry? Okay!" he said brightly, mocking and sharp, lips pinched tight and bloodless. "So when is a good time? Later? After everyone here is dead? Well, it would sure cut down on all those _pesky_ questions people keep asking."

There was a grunt of annoyance behind them and a pair of large hands lifted the Black Arrow off of Harper's back with soundless ease. "While you two girls are bitching at each other," said Jones. "I'll be joining our friend up on the stairs, mm... yes? Jump in whenever you're ready." Jones turned and pointed at their remaining team member. "You."

The boy jumped. He couldn't have been any older then nineteen; some hulking farm kid who'd survived the countryside massacres purely on luck alone.

"Stand over there," said Jones. The boy eyed the spot in front of the rotted out hotel with a wary expression. "Yes, there. Just keep walking until you feel dizzy. Stop. That's the edge of the dead zone. Congratulations, you've graduated from cannon fodder to bait."

Sweat dripped slick and wet off the greasepaint on the boy's face. "But–"

"Now, Francis," Harry barked, finally remembering the boy's name. "We've got you covered." His mouth curled into a thin, hard smile. "Feel free to conjure up a tutu and dance the dying swan."

"Sir." The boy bobbed his head and skittered away over the soggy muck piled in the streets.

"So, standard bait and capture?" said Harper, seemingly unruffled, anger gone as if it were never there.

Harry knew their conversation was far from over. "Amazing how many times they'll fall for the same damn thing."

Harper wedged himself further into the little blockade, sharp eyes picking out the shine of the Muggles' weapons in the light rain falling around them. "You'd think they would have learned by now."

He followed Harper's lead, crouching down behind the rubble. "They're Muggles, Harp, they don't understand wizards. They expect to be attacked with grand light shows and people pulling rabbits out of hats, not a bunch of soldiers armed with guns."

"Be verwwy verwwy quiet. We're huntin' wizards," Harper quipped in his best Elmer Fudd voice.

"Where did you learn _that_?" Harry muttered to Luna's cousin.

Harper actually looked offended. "Hey, half-blood here, remember?"

Francis put on an award-winning performance, dropping to the ground near the edge of the dead zone and flailing enthusiastically while crying out in imagined pain. "Please," he cried out. "Please help me! They hurt me! There were strange lights and people in masks! It hurt! It hurt so badly!"

Making allusions to Death Eaters – very nice. Harry had to give the boy props for his creative initiative. Everyone knew about Death Eaters these days. Too many destroyed buildings with the Dark Mark hanging over them and suddenly word got out: Beware of strange figures in dark cloaks and white masks for they killed without care or warning.

There was movement in the building across from the old hotel and Harry knew the Muggles had taken the bait, hook, line and sinker.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 1027 hours**

"Tell me again, where did you see the Death Eaters?"

The fat Muggle screwed up his piggy face and spat at Harry. Harper uncoiled from his relaxed pose, arm outstretched to strike the Muggle, but subsided when Harry shook his head.

Harry calmly wiped the spittle from his face, sighing at the man's continued stubbornness. He tilted his head, paused, and then nodded to himself.

And promptly jabbed his thumb into the gunshot wound on the fat Muggle's shoulder.

The man howled, thrashing against the bindings holding him to the concrete supports of an underground parking garage. "Fuck you! We thought _you_ were the Death Eaters!"

"No. We're the good guys, remember?" Harry drawled. "If you don't shoot at us, we won't shoot back."

Fatty eyed Harry up and down, disgust twisting his froggish face into something downright hideous. _'Definitely got beaten with the ugly stick as a child,'_ Harry thought to himself.

"You know, you don't have to tell me anything," said Harry tiredly, standing up from his crouch, joints clicking in protest. "I do have alternative means of getting information. It's all up to you."

"Harry," Harper groaned. "Stop fucking around already."

"Yeah, Harry," Fatty crowed. "Stop fucking around already, oh Mr. I-_do-_have-alternative-means-of-getting-information. Spook, spook, _spook,_ cunt-munch."

Harry broke one of the man's fingers.

"Just so you know," Harry remarked idly, his expression still placid and serene as he ignored the sound of Fatty's scream bouncing off the crumbling walls of the parking garage. "_I'm_ the witty one here and I'd thank you very kindly to keep a civil tongue in your head."

"Or what," Fatty replied, gasping for breath. "You'll rip it out of my skull? Be pretty hard to get your info after that."

'_More balls than brains in this one.'_ Harry smiled and patted the man's cheek. "Not at all. Just think _real hard_ and I'll take it from there."

The man's eyes widened before narrowing with suspicion. "You can't do that – there's no such thing as magic." Fatty laughed and shook his head, greasy rat-tail flying every which way. "Yer just a bunch of freaks with a clever gimmick. Pull the other one."

"Okay," Harry agreed reasonably, feeling mellow and generous.

So he did.

The man talked. They always did.

"Good news is," Harry began as he wiped Fatty's blood from his fingers. "We now know where their new clubhouse is located." He glanced over at Harper's distinctly annoyed countenance. "Is it just me or are these crazy fucks kind of like roaches? No matter how many times we wipe them out, they pop right back up again."

Harper crossed his arms and leaned back on his heels. "The bad news being that he didn't know one damn thing about Death Eaters."

"Got it in one," Harry replied distractedly as he cut Fatty's remains loose from the concrete piling. "But he knew someone who does."

"What are you going to do?"

An eager thrill of anticipation flared to life low in Harry's belly. "What most people do when they want to enter someone's home." He bared his teeth in a harsh, diamond-edged grin. "I'm going to knock on their door."

'_Little pig, little pig, let me in. Or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your shitty bolt-hole up into itty-bitty pieces.'_

Harper rolled his eyes and turned to walk away. "I'll let the others know you've decided to engage Operation: Candygram for Mungo."

Harry glanced up, nonplussed.

"I know you too well, Harry," Harper said over his shoulder. "And _you_ are one _crazy_ motherfucker." There was a note of reluctant admiration in his voice as he disappeared up the stairs leading to aboveground.

The fat man's corpse lay crumpled at the base of the piling. Harry seized the ankles and dragged the body away from the concrete pillar to lie flat, spread-eagled on the grimy floor beneath his boots.

Time to get down and dirty.

He found that beneath the man's ratty overcoat, that Fatty wasn't very fat at all – his belly distended with starvation and disease.

"What do you want to bet," he asked the corpse. "That if I cut you open, we'll find all sorts of wiggly little parasites swimming around in your gut?"

The corpse didn't reply.

"Nobody appreciates my jokes anymore," Harry muttered morosely.

Harry shucked off his heavy over-robes and folded them neatly into increasingly smaller squares until he could roll them into a pill-box shape small enough to fit into the same satchel hooked to his belt that he carried his extra ammo in. The leather half-gloves followed the robes. His arms were bare and pale beneath the short-sleeved t-shirt and thick, dragonhide vest, streaked to the elbows with grey and black greasepaint.

The frigid touch of winter was a lot more noticeable without the extra insulation.

But it sure as hell beat making a mess of everything. Harry opened the switchblade with a decisive **snick** and began the process of skinning Fatty's face from his flesh.

He whistled a merry little tune as he carved; skin sliding slick and slippery with blood through his fingers.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 1103 hours**

Francis had gawked at Harry's new appearance.

"What? Never seen a dead man walk around before?" he'd asked the boy.

"You're a sick fuck, Potter," Harper had grumbled.

He'd laughed in reply.

Now they were about 1500 meters out from one of the Muggles' hidden entryways.

Sometime in late 2005, Wizards flooded the Thames, putting large parts of London under three to damn near six meters of water depending on the tide. Parts around the docks were still underwater, boats and other remains sometimes floating right up next to skyscrapers and towers in downtown London; it was an almost comical sight to see a fishing boat bumping into the burnt-out remnants of high-rise flats and office buildings. The stagnant edges of the floodwaters had iced over in the cold January winter and it was frozen solid enough that in some places, you could even walk on it.

Not that many tried. Stumbling over a corpse frozen into the floodwaters, their features bloated, black, frostbitten flesh beginning to sag and decompose, was unnerving even to Harry's crew, who'd long since grown used to all manner of sins.

Most of London was too treacherous to walk through, despite the rubble piled up and packed with sandbags to block off certain streets from the wet muck. Floodwaters dragged old fuel, coal, trash, oil, building remains, bodies and faeces all up and down what were once the streets of a vibrant city. Now, they were nothing more than death traps. The stench was horrible.

Debris piled in the flooded river allowed Harry and his team to jump the floodwaters without having to take some of the other routes, one of which would take them far too close to another dead zone.

Francis stumbled over a particularly treacherous bit of footing; an old car bumper, chrome rusting and peeling back in shiny flakes, slid out from under his boots and landed with a muted splash in the murky river. Harry caught the boy by the scruff of his robes before he could follow its path.

Francis gasped out his thanks, shuddering at Harry's latest get-up.

"Watch your step," Harry growled. "You fall in, I'm not coming after you."

The boy nodded, almost swallowing his tongue.

Harry let go of him and climbed over a mound of concrete boulders piled over one another, rusty steel rebar bent back on itself like spindly red-brown fingers. He dragged Fatty's filthy overcoat closer to him and shivered. The chill of winter hung closer here, fog clinging to the river and his team. A meter and a half in front of him and visibility petered out into pearly grey mist. Ice crunched underfoot, dingy snow clinging to his boots.

Remains of a large fisheries research vessel moaned as it rubbed up against the concrete siding of an old office tower. Its once-white hull was coated in grey-brown river-muck and almost perfectly blended in with its environment. Other than the sound of water lapping at her metal sides, the ship was virtually undetectable.

Which made it the perfect spot for a group of fanatical Muggles to hide out.

Harry waved his team back and assumed Fatty's limping half-step.

He dragged himself over the last few meters alone to the ship's ladder and climbed up her side, rust flaking off in his hands. The information he'd ripped from the man's mind told him to knock twice, wait four counts then knock again.

Harry swung his frame over the railing and limped over to the door. It was obviously a new addition to the boat, a hastily welded project – its steel edges were raw and ragged and the thing was barely hanging onto its hinges. He pounded his fist on the metal door; sound rolling out muted like deep bells covered in wool.

The metal plate on the door slid open. Harry kept the hood of the heavy overcoat down over his eyes and hiding the edges of Fatty's fuck-ugly face where it was plastered on over his own. Thick, cooling blood dribbled sluggishly down Harry's neck, hidden by the coat's high collar. The face felt slimy and oil slick against his own, the edges near the hairline and neck drying stiff and tight to his skin.

"Where the fuck have you been?" The voice was hoarse, masculine, and royally pissed-off. "I swear to God, Benny, if you stay out this late again, I won't let you back in."

Remembering Fatty's slovenly mannerisms, Harry stuffed his hands into the overcoat's deep pockets and burped in reply. Some of Fatty's blood seeped into his mouth and Harry turned his head and spat against the trash piled by the door. The lip articulation was as poor as one might have expected, bloody flesh slip-sliding against his mouth as he moved.

The eyes framed in the security window narrowed with disgust. "Fucking slob." The plate slid shut and there was the rusty growl of steel shifting against steel.

And the door slid open.

The man was holding a crowbar in one hand and munching on some kind of snack packet with the other. Behind him was a short, red-lit hallway, emergency backup lights gleaming merrily in the dark.

Looked like somebody else had generators too. If they were functional, Harry would take a team back later to retrieve them.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" Crowbar growled around his mouthful of granola. "An engraved invitation?"

Harry looked up and smiled. The man blinked, sucking in a sharp breath and choking on it. Crumbs spilled out of the man's mouth as he clutched at his throat, face turning purple with asphyxiation, his eyes staring directly into Harry's new face with horror.

Up close, the dried blood crusted around the eyeholes and nostrils of Fatty's face got _really_ noticeable.

"You!" he gasped.

Harry didn't give him time to finish that thought. Quick as snake, he slipped beneath the man's guard and ripped the weapon from his grasp. Wrapping a hand around Crowbar's neck to pin him in place, Harry locked his gaze onto bloodshot blue eyes and shoved his mind forward.

'_Legilimens__!'_

Colour and lights flashed by his mind's eye at breakneck speed. Riffling through Crowbar's dazed, frightened headspace, Harry swiftly ripped what he wanted from the man's memories. Davis, he was looking for a man named Davis.

Snicker-snack, a red smile slashed through the man's throat and Harry let him crumple into a limp heap by the open door. Lit as he was with the dull red of the emergency lights, Crowbar looked like he was only sleeping, the dark spray of arterial blood masked by the shadows of his chin nodding to touch his chest.

Harry glanced back outside and raised his hand, forefinger and thumb pinched together in the classic O.K. gesture. Harper, Francis and Jonesy hustled out of the shadows towards him. The other member of their team hadn't made it. Harry hadn't even bothered to learn his name.

Rusted, salt-burned metal groaned around them; the generators were louder in here, the decaying hull of the ship humming beneath Harry's boots. There was a door at the end of the room – Harry wasn't familiar with boat-lingo, but he knew it was a fucking door – and braced himself beside it, Berretta held at the ready. Harper nodded and swung the door open, rusted metal moaning in protest.

Harry rolled off the wall, gun braced in his hands and ready to fire.

Silence. Nothing there save for more of the same red-lit corridors, white paint peeling and streaked brown at the corroding metal seams of the interior.

He waved Jonesy and Francis down the corridor to the left, keeping a dubious eye on the hallway to his right. It ended abruptly in a pile of metal scraps, packed in with sandbags and soggy newspaper.

"Where to?" Harper murmured.

Harry pointed up in reply. "Pick off anything that moves."

Harper nodded and crawled up the ladder next to the door, boots thudding dully against the metal rungs.

The hallway stretched out in front of him, a red light at the end flickering erratically. Harry took one last glance at the hallway to his right, and then continued forward. There were a couple of doors down here too, but they were all rusted shut and no light shone from inside their portholes. The information from Crowbar's mind told him to ignore these doors and take the ladder on the far wall down two levels to the sleeping quarters.

The lights flickered around him, walls vanishing into darkness before the generators caught the lapse and the emergency lights gleamed once more.

Harry followed the ladder downwards.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 1136 hours**

Gunfire echoed overhead.

Harry rose from his crouch by the door and slipped from the room, leaving behind five dead men still rolled in their sleeping bags, throats slashed open, blood pooling on the floor under their cots. This close to the generators and all other noises were swallowed up by the thrum of the machines.

But there was no hiding the sharp retort of the automatic rifle above him.

Harry poked his head around the corner, jerking backwards on reflex at the sight of more than a dozen angry men holding weapons on the other side. Bullets pinged off the metal walls above him.

The sound was echoed by more gunfire one level above them.

"Holy shit!" one of the men breathed. "I think that was Benny. Oh fuck, we shot Benny!"

Harry stood from where he'd hit the ground and bent close to the wall, one hand bracing his weight against the ship's hull, the other hiding the Berretta close to his body like he'd been shot in the gut. Harry groaned loudly and more of Fatty's sticky blood dripped into his mouth. He tilted his head down, letting the blood and a large glob of saliva drip from his lips.

He groaned again and that galvanized two of the men to check around the corner. Harry surreptitiously checked from under his eyelashes if either bloke was Davis.

They weren't.

"Bloody hell," said the taller of the two. "I think he's still alive."

A hand landed on his shoulder. "Hey! Hey buddy! You hanging in there? You don't look so… Good God!"

Harry lifted his head.

The man looked startled, like he'd finally realized that the eyes in the sagging visage of their comrade weren't shit-brown and dull, but rather a bright, hyper green, alien and jarring in the skin's muddy features.

"Hi," Harry rasped, smiling real big like everything was all hunky-dory and he was asking if his friend could come out and play. "I'm looking for Davis?"

Their eyes widened and Harry took the opportunity to fire off two warning shots.

Cursing filled the air from around the corner.

"I'm just looking for Davis!" Harry called out. "I only need to talk to him about Death Eater sightings. This could end without any more bloodshed!"

"Fuck you," came the succinct reply.

Harry couldn't help but chuckle. "Yeah, Benny said that too."

He couldn't perform any major spells as close as he was to a dead zone, but Harry could pull off a simple summoning charm without a hitch. His wand fizzled and spat sparks angrily, but the spell worked.

There were startled cries of dismay and then a swarm of weapons swooped down the hallway from around the corner and clattered to the ground somewhere behind him.

Harry stepped out from around the corner.

Fear could make a man lose all reason and rationality. It had a way of winding you up so tight inside that the only thing left was fight or flight. The group of Muggles crammed into the narrow hallway looked scared now, furious and frightened, more adrenaline than actual blood running in their veins.

So when one of them drew his hidden weapon and growled, "You're one of those wizard freaks," Harry knew what was coming next.

He smiled. "Benny didn't believe it."

And then there was a wall of crazy Muggles coming at him, weapons drawn, their faces twisted with hate.

Three went down with a bullet in the chest before the mob got too close for Harry's Berretta to be effective, shots painfully loud and echoing in the tight space of the ship. He dropped the gun and whirled under someone's wild swing, blade passing close overhead, catching the man's wrist and twisting it just _so_, that when Harry stood from his crouch, the blade was driven up under the man's chin and into his skull by his own hand.

Hell of a way to get somebody's attention.

They're back-pedalling, but it was too late and in too close quarters to run. Harry grabbed the Muggle shooting at him and smacked the gun from his hand, weapon clattering to the ground, and cleanly sliced through the man's throat. The body slumped to the ground.

The bright shine of a blade glittered in the corner of Harry's eye and then he was moving again, grabbing the man's arm and using his momentum against him, rolling the body over his shoulder and headfirst into the floor with a sharp **crack**, head lolling on his neck at a sickening angle.

Fatty's small eyelids cut down on Harry's peripherals so he peeled the skin from his face with a wet, sloppy squelching sound and flung it into the eyes of someone coming at him with a wickedly curved blade. The man let out a scream, wet flesh smacking into flesh and blundered blindly past Harry. Flicker quick, Harry jabbed his elbow into the man's temple.

He went down too.

Stars flashed in Harry's vision, his ears ringing from the blow to the head.

"You must be Davis," said Harry as he stumbled back from the man, blood dripping from the cut on his head. Fucker had a ring on; the skin was torn and tender where Davis had struck him. "Nice to meet you."

There was a note of recognition in Davis' eyes. "The Infamous Harry Potter himself. It's an honour. Who the fuck did I piss-off this morning to warrant attention from the likes of you?"

Harry grinned. "Nothing personal," he replied. "I was just out hunting Death Eaters. And like usual, you and yours got in my way."

Davis blocked Harry's jab and slashed out with a knife hidden against his forearm. "I thought you were here to talk about finding said Death Eaters."

"I lied."

It was subtle, but Harry saw Davis' aborted flinch at his bald declaration of deceit. "You're _mad_."

Harry laughed and the sound bounced off the walls of the ship, metal ringing in resonance. "Oh, we're _all_ mad 'round here."

Davis' lip curled and he brought his knife back in a downward swing. Instead of dodging away from the blade, Harry moved forward. He slid inside Davis' guard and gripping his wrist, spun out with an elbow to the throat and Davis crumpled to the ground. Harry palmed the blade before it hit the floor and slashed it backhanded through Davis' gut, tearing him open hip to hip.

Metal clicked on metal as someone cocked a gun.

And blood spurted from their throat, the knife embedding itself up to the hilt. Harry's hand was still outstretched from where he'd thrown the blade, crouched over Davis' dying form, when Harper melted out of the shadows and fired four rounds into the spineless fucks trying to flee.

There was blood streaked wet and dark up the side of his robes and some of it looked suspiciously like handprints.

Still gasping out his last moments on the floor of the ship, Davis fumbled at the ropey loops of pink-grey intestine spilling out of the hole in his gut; valiantly trying to stuff them back in.

Harry picked up his gun and stood. He watched Davis' pathetic struggles for a moment longer, and then fired two rounds into his head. Mushy bone and grey matter splattered out from the back of Davis' head, mixing with the other mingled fluids slicking the floor of the ship.

Harry couldn't tell for sure, but he thought Harper might have heard that last part.

Because the look he gave Harry seemed a hell of a lot like betrayal.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 1215 hours**

Unlike the Lesser Dead such as Shadow Hands or Inferi as they were more commonly known, the Greater Dead did not need substance or sustenance; swift-running water was the only thing that kept them away and the stagnant muck flooding the city did nothing to deter them. If they were attracted to great sites of slaughter, then London was the largest, juiciest graveyard around, her numbers thinning by the day. The veils here between death and life were at their flimsiest.

The necromancer had followed them from the ship.

There was a red shine in La Muerte's eyes, something old and mean that spoke of blood and bloodlust. He stank of funeral flowers and embalming fluid, of musty places and cold earth and when the wind blew past, Harry could catch the faint scent of burning flesh.

He was an anomaly out here amongst the ash and wreckage of London's business district; the necromancer's long dark coat, crisply pleated linen trousers and shiny black shoes coming across as more slick politician than a man who noted for being up to his elbows in the blood of the dead.

Harry wasn't fooled for one second. He'd seen the kind of mercy the necromancer liked to dispense.

"Mr. Potter, how pleasant to see you again." The man's voice was urbane and genteel, a faint lilting inflection to his words betraying his South American origins. He was a lean man of average height; dark-haired and dark-eyed, his olive skin bore few wrinkles and he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old based on appearance alone.

"Wish I could say the same to you," Harry replied, hand creeping towards his wand.

"Ahh, still holding a grudge, I see. How is that hand of yours doing these days?" The wind blew back the edges of his coat far enough that Harry could see the dull gleam of a worn leather bandolier against the rich, burgundy silk of his waistcoat, seven heavy, pillbox-shaped cases swinging from their ties. Inside those cases were the bronze bells of a necromancer; the strongest tools he wielded against the dead, save for his will.

Harry bit his tongue against the incoherent rage that wanted to rear its head. "Just fine actually," he replied lightly. "The medics had a bit of trouble trying to reattach it so they decided to grow me a new one. They were _very_ upset to have to tell me that."

"I'm sure they were," the necromancer purred.

"But between you and me," Harry said, laying a finger to the side of his nose as if he were sharing a secret with an old friend. "I kinda like the new one better. More mobility, you know? The old one had so many annoying little aches and pains."

"You're much more polite to me today," the necromancer said with a smile. "This _is_ an improvement. Especially when your respect comes so _grudgingly_ at the cost of something important to you."

Harry sneered. "Calling it _'respect'_ would be a stretch."

The necromancer's smile flickered. "I would treat you like an equal, Mr Potter, if you would afford me the same courtesies I extend to you. But of course, I would never expect that from somebody whose idea of polite necessity involves a wand in my face and a bullet hole in my gut," he said, biting out the last syllable.

"What can I say? Any man who calls himself 'Death incarnate' deserves to at least be on speaking terms with the reaper," Harry said, shrugging as he kept a cautious hand on his wand.

"We all have our masters to answer to. _Mine_ is Death. Yours… is guilt," said the necromancer, a thread of amusement entering his voice. "Which is a _delightful_ contradiction considering your propensity for murder and mayhem."

Harry wasn't eager to clash with La Muerte again, but damned if the necromancer didn't know how to push all of the right buttons. "Fuck off," he growled. "You're no saint yourself. What gives you the right to cast judgement on me?"

"And what gives _you _the right to cast judgement on me?" The necromancer smiled and this time it held a hint of smugness. "The truth is never bliss. Easier to live in self-centred solipsism than to acknowledge the hard facts of our failures, isn't it?"

"You say such sweet things to me. I might get all a-flustered here," Harry replied mockingly in a breathy falsetto. "You're surprisingly talkative today," he said, dropping the sugary tones. "I didn't know Tom paid you to be friendly."

"There's no shame in being sociable." The necromancer spread his hands apart, gesturing to the wreckage around them. "We are titans cut from the same cloth, trapped here together in a desolate Hell. The least we can do is be civil to one another lest we destroy this place any further."

"'Lest _we_ destroy this place any further?' _This place?_ You might as well consider this your finest masterpiece. This is _your_ Hell."

"My Hell?" The amused note was back. "I _like _this new London. It's _beautiful_. It's like Christmas and Easter and birthday parties wrapped up into one grand package of pain and rage and hurt."

"Must suck, then," said Harry, almost vibrating with tension. "Having me come through and fuck with your sandbox."

"Oh Mr. Potter, why would I ever want to kill you when you do a better job of torturing yourself than I ever will? You are a _wonderful_ addition to my… sandbox as you've called it.

"But let's not quibble over semantics here. I actually enjoy your company. If I had to be trapped with anyone here, I would _always_ want it to be you. There is no greater entertainment than watching someone as noble as you poison himself with hatred and destruction."

Harry bared his teeth. "You know, I have to wonder who you're trying to get back at. Me? Or Tom, who left you here and hasn't done one damn thing to get you back out. He trapped you in here to do his dirty work because he doesn't have the stones to take me down himself."

"He has more to lose than you or I." The necromancer pulled a heavy bronze pocket watch from his coat and glanced over it idly. "I, on the other hand, have no reason to fear death and on the very day that I begin to, I have sworn an oath to take my own life. Until then, you will simply have to put up with me."

There was a strange amicability in the necromancer's attitude that set Harry's teeth on edge, a sense that he had all the time in the world and nothing better to spend it on.

'_He's stalling.'_

Awareness washed over him and Harry's muscles tensed, adrenaline surging through him. "What did you do?"

"Nothing you haven't done yourself."

"_**What**__ did you do?"_ Harry snarled.

The necromancer smiled and disappeared.

Harry was off and running even before his brain registered movement.

He could hear the crash of Jones kicking down the door and the hellish roar of La Muerte's latest jack-in-the-box. Harry rounded the street corner in time to see the doorway of the ransacked department store belch thick, cloying smoke and white-hot flame into the street.

A Mordicant had waited in ambush – one of the Greater Dead that could pass at will through Life or Death. Crafted from putrid bog-clay and human blood; its cadaverous body was gaunt, vaguely humanoid shaped with overlong, emaciated limbs and spiny bone-spurs on its joints. Its knees bent backwards like a goats and like its hands, the Mordicant's feet held ten- digits like a man's, with dark, curling talons. Pale, dirty fire boiled off of its form, old blood beading like sweat on its rotting skin; infused with Free Magic and independent of La Muerte's will, the Mordicant had all the personality of a rabid Doberman and a damn near _human_ intelligence driving it along.

Harry hurtled over Jones' slumped form in the doorway and slammed into the Mordicant, going ass over teakettle as he tangled with its smoky figure. Fire kissed his skin, causing the greasepaint smeared on his face to melt and drip from his chin as he rolled free of the creature, Fatty's overcoat singed and smoking.

A stench like burned hair and molten copper wafted off the Mordicant. The coal-like eyes of the dead burned with fury in its misshapen skull and the thing screamed, a hoarse, shrill howl that reminded Harry of the squeal of metal on metal like the breaks on a train and the lower, harder sound of a lion's roar.

And then it lunged at him.

Flicker quick, it struck, too-long arms batting Harry aside, its form nothing more than a searing blur of heat and pain. Harry found himself being hurled across the empty department store. He bounced off the far wall like a rag doll, the taste of blood exploding inside his mouth, pain twisting his throat shut.

He lay sprawled there for a moment, stunned, as the Mordicant licked its talons free of Harry's blood with a long, lizard-like tongue, a sound of satisfaction rising out of its desiccated throat.

The thing looked at him and smiled, rising up on its back-hinged joints, its lower jaw unhinging unnaturally wide. Blue flame flickered deep in the Mordicant's throat from behind gleaming, needle-like teeth the colour of steel.

Harry stumbled to his feet, dazed and almost coltish from vertigo. Blood dribbled from four long gashes over his right shoulder and collarbone, dragonhide armour neatly sliced through as if it were butter. He jabbed his wand at the wound and muttered a hasty healing spell. They'd scar without proper aftercare, but Harry could honestly say he didn't give a flying fuck at the moment.

The Mordicant let out a strange chittering sound and swiped at Harry again, smoke curling through the air around it.

Harry narrowly ducked out of the creature's reach. He didn't know how to express the sheer terror he felt when he realized the creature was playing with him; much like a cat would a mouse. "Harper! Move your ass!"

A silver hex struck the Mordicant, freezing the air with its passage.

Harper yanked Jones' arm over his shoulder, hauling the injured man away with Francis' help, another Frostbite hex sailing towards the creature.

It turned and yowled at Harper, spitting like a wet cat.

Harry drew his sword and ignored the pain in his ribs as he sliced a line of blue fire up the Mordicant's skeletal back, shining sparks flying up where the sword touched its flesh, blood vessels pumping dark and ugly under the gauze-thin membrane of its skin.

The thing whirled, screaming with rage, both sets of talons clawing at Harry.

And Harper slammed a broken piece of rebar into its ribs.

The Mordicant's skin was so hot that it began to melt the steel upon contact; smoke and a great stink of burnt hair billowed out in a thick black cloud from the wound. Ugly, brackish blood seeped from the thing's bony ribs. And where it dripped on the floor, it left a series of etching like acid on metal.

Harper dropped the red-hot steel with a cry. "Shit!"

"You alright?" Harry called out over the thing's startled yowl.

"Yeah, let's tag-team this bitch," Harper replied shaking out his burnt hand, drawing his wand with the other.

He flicked his wand in a figure-eight pattern and there came a grinding sound from underneath Harry's feet.

Heavy steel beams shot up out of the floor, impaling the Mordicant before melting. The hot metal stench thickened, glowing slag gouging large holes in the concrete floor.

The Mordicant howled, its cry rising to a fever pitch, black-brown fluids seeping from its wounds. It lunged toward Harry, the creature's talons striking golden embers from his sword as Harry batted its hand aside. Something that looked like razor wire wrapped around the Mordicant's throat, the glittering spell drawing more brackish blood before dissipating. Its lower jaw unhinged, maw yawning wide as an unearthly shriek rent the air, blue fire billowing out of its throat.

"Toss me your sword!" said Harper. "I'll get it from behind!"

Harry twisted around a flailing limb, driving his blade up under the armpit and out above the collarbone. "You've watched too many action movies, idiot! I'm not throwing a naked blade at you willy-nilly."

The Mordicant flinched away, its arm swinging limply at its side as it crooned mournfully at the wounded limb; the sound like broken glass rubbing against gravel. The keening cry raised the hairs on the back of Harry's neck, his teeth buzzing in his skull, nausea rising in his belly and he bellowed at Harper: "Just summon the damn thing already!"

Magic tugged at the sword in his hands and he relinquished his hold obligingly. It sailed across the room, hilt swinging around and smacking comfortably into Harper's palm.

The Mordicant's attention caught by the flying object, Harry darted forward and jabbed the wakizashi into the creature's gut, whirling away when the creature reached for him with its good arm.

There was a flash of gold sparks behind the Mordicant and the thing crumpled to the ground, nearly on top of Harry. Its mewling cries hit a supersonic note too close to his head and Harry cried out in pain as his left eardrum blew out, blood dribbling down his neck. "Fuck!"

His stomached churned at the pain in his skull and the loss of equilibrium. Harry found himself listing to the side as he watched Harper behead the Mordicant.

The head rolled away from the Mordicant's skeletal frame; jaw still working in a silent, ululating scream. Its flame-like eyes darkened as the spirit inhabiting the spell-form fled for Death, the Mordicant's body turning into a shrivelled husk and flaking away into ash.

Harry swayed as his body wrestled with the vertiginous sensations running through him. Then the world was tipping… all the way to the floor.

"Harry?" Harper called out, worry straining his voice.

Harry turned his head and puked to the side in reply.

Harper mumbled something that sounded like 'fucking death-wish' as he dragged Harry away from the puddle of vomit.

"_Toss_ me the fucking _sword_?" Harry mocked, his words drunkenly slurred. "Dumbass."

"I know, I know, heat of the moment," Harper murmured as he hauled Harry around to sit upright against the side of the building. He chanted a series of musical sounding words, pointing his wand at Harry's head. Some of the dizziness went away and Harry found that he could hear out of that ear again.

"Better?" Harper asked, holding out a hand.

"Yeah," Harry replied as he took Harper's free hand and pulled himself to his feet. "Ribs are still broken, but I don't have the potion to fix that on me."

Harper handed his sword back. "Good thing you got here when you did. Damn thing almost disembowelled Jonesy."

"He's fine," Harper amended at Harry's look. "Bait-boy has a surprisingly deft hand at mediwizardry."

"Francis?" Harry asked as he summoned the wakizashi back to him. "Shit, now I've heard everything."

Harper followed him out of the ruined department and Harry vainly tried to ignore how he hovered like a mother hen. Jones' heavy form was perched on a pile of rubble as he kept a wary watch on the empty street around them.

Harry glanced at Francis' bloodstained hands. The boy saw him looking and pinked with embarrassment.

He offered the boy a smile of approval after catching Jonesy's eye to make sure he was still lucid and kicking. "Let's move it. No way somebody else didn't hear that ruckus."

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 1302 hours**

The sun should have been high overhead. But between the sleet outside and the dirty windows of the safe house, gloom was the only thing that peaked through the grey mess outside.

Harry pulled a small package of beef jerky out of his pocket and tore into it, hunger gnawing at his insides. The warehouse they'd holed up in had once been used to store non-perishable food products. Now it was filled with bare shipping crates and dust.

Neil and his group were supposed to have been here by now; they hadn't showed up at the boat and they hadn't met up afterward. Uneasy tension churned low in his belly.

Harper caught his eye and nodded to an empty corner, eyes flicking over Jones and Francis before lighting on his own again.

Harry crumpled the empty packet in his hand and stuffed it into Fatty's pockets. Not like the man was going to complain about littering anytime soon. He dipped his head to Harper and moved away from the low murmur of conversation between Francis and Jones' silent form, wry mirth writ in the heavy droop of the man's eyelids.

Dust swirled in the air, muted boot-steps stirring up the grit beneath them.

Harry wrapped his arms around the ache in his ribs as he glanced out of the window, noting the change in weather. Snow. Fan-fucking-tastic.

The dark paint smeared across Harper's face lent his silver gaze a resemblance to the flat stare of a shark. "So," Harper drawled. "I guess this is where we have that poignant heart-to-heart you were so eager to avoid earlier."

"I'm not sure what you're aiming for here," Harry remarked, resolutely staring out the dirty window.

"I don't care," Harper bluntly replied. "I'm tired of dancing around the subject."

Harry cracked his neck before putting his hands on his hips. "Keep on talking," he replied, calm despite the slow burn of anger beginning to course through his veins. "I want to see how deep a hole you're going to dig for yourself."

A not-quite smile twisted the corner of Harper's mouth. "Harry, if I don't call you out on the crazy shit you pull, who will? The others? They're too scared of you to say anything."

"I know you have a problem with my methods," Harry began.

"Oh it's not your methods I have a problem with," Harper corrected.

Harry was starting to lose the stranglehold on his temper. "Then what is it?" he bit out, turning his head to the side, just able to catch Harper's expression out of the corner of his eye. "You've been questioning me every step of this patrol and I have to say, I don't need you challenging my authority when we're in a life or death situation. There are easier ways to get yourself killed."

There was a snort of derision from Harper. "Funny you should say that."

Harry spun to face him. "Don't play coy with me. If you have a problem, fucking well spit it out already."

Harper laughed, shoving his hands into his pockets as he scuffed the bottom of one worn boot in the grit of the floor. "C'mon, Potter, how long are you going to continue this farce? I mean, since we both know you're just going through the motions." Harper grinned and made a crude jerking-off motion with one hand. "You don't care about me – you don't even care about yourself. I knew you were tail-spinning, but back there with the Muggles? _That_ was a whole new level of fucked-up even for you."

Harry shivered, Fatty's bloodstained coat not offering much in the way of insulation now that the adrenaline was wearing off. He didn't want to risk a warming charm for fear of detection. "What are you getting at, Harper? Make it quick 'cause it's fucking freezing in here."

"Are there even Death Eaters here?" asked Harper, not bothering to hide the accusatory note in his voice. "We've already attracted the notice of your buddy, the necromancer. You that eager to lose the other hand too?"

"Shut the fuck up," Harry growled.

"Is there even a good reason why we're here besides playing ring-around-the-rosy with the reaper?"

Harry met his gaze and held it, unflinching. "Yes. Neville's patrol found solid evidence of Death Eater activity in this sector. The Muggles were just an opportunity to rid us of a problem."

"That was one hell of a way to go about it."

"What can I say?" Harry replied with a humourless smile. "Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Which brings me back to my original point. You have a problem with my methods? Fine. But don't bring it up in front of the same people who expect me to keep them alive each time we venture out here. I don't need your insubordination on top of that. _You_ asked to be a part of this operation. And against my better judgement, I let you because I needed someone I could trust to watch my back."

"I know," Harper said, nodding his head. It was a fervent, school-boyish gesture and Harry was abruptly reminded of how much younger Harper was than him. Five years might as well been a lifetime. "For three years, I haven't questioned you at all. But Harry, you're getting reckless, and worse than that, you're getting _careless_ about being reckless. Everyone else is starting to see it, too."

At Harry's questioning look, he continued. "Why do you think that nobody wants to be on your team for patrols? I must be unbelievably lucky, because I'm one of the few who keep coming back alive. How many others can say that?"

Harry sighed. "This is a dangerous world we live in, Harper. Shit happens. I can't save everybody."

"I don't expect you to. But I don't know if I can trust your judgement these days. You treat these patrols way too casually. We're not tin soldiers, Harry."

Harry rolled his eyes and went to rub the bridge of his nose, before remembering the blood and paint smeared across his face. "I would never mistake you for a tin soldier, Harper. If you were, you might actually do what I tell you to on occasion," he replied drolly.

"See, this right now, this is what I'm talking about," said Harper, his expression gone mulish, muscle ticking in his jaw as he pointed a finger at Harry. "You're treating this war like a joke."

"I'm not treating it like a joke," Harry assured him, a smile creeping onto his face at his own black humour. "If I was, it would probably have a better punch line."

It didn't even warrant a sliver of a grin. "Well, you're certainly not taking it seriously. This place, this absolute hell we are living in… it should have you shaking with terror – or at least _cautious_ and _wary_. Instead… you act like you're taking a walk in the park on a sunny day." Harper shook his head in disbelief, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "_What is wrong with you?_ Don't drag me into your passive suicide."

_'Too late,'_ Harry thought idly.

Some of what he was thinking must have shown on his face, because Harper's mouth tightened in anger and for a faint second, Harry could see a flash of fear and hurt in his eyes.

Harry chuckled without feeling any true mirth. He spread his arms wide and gestured to the grimy walls of the warehouse around him. "Look around you,Harper_._ This was never going to end in a happily ever after."

"You're giving up?" said Harper disbelievingly, voice rising shrill and tight at the end.

"Do you know where Voldemort is?" asked Harry calmly. "'Cause I don't. He's not even in the UK – hasn't been for over two years. And I can't get out of the country. I can't go looking for him. I can't chase the bastard down and destroy him. The Dark Lord cut his losses a long time ago and left. As far as I'm concerned, he _won_. End of story."

"So you're just going to let everybody's death be meaningless?"

"This whole war is meaningless. It was started a long time before either of us was born; now it's devolved into hatred for the sake of hatred." Harry glanced at Harper's pole-axed expression. Poor boy looked like somebody had ripped the rug out from under him. "Oh don't give me that look, Harp. You didn't really think we were going to get out of this mess alive?"

"No." The word was faint and sad, but underneath that was a live current of anger that burned holes in Harper's next words. "But I thought I would at least have the opportunity to choose how I died. But instead, my best friend is treating me like cannon fodder because he's decided that _he doesn't want to play with all of the other kiddies anymore_."

Harry lashed out.

Harper spun three hundred and sixty degrees before hitting the ground.

Their conversation had apparently gotten loud enough to attract the notice of Jones and Francis.

"Whoa, whoa, _whoa!_" Jones said as he inserted himself between Harry and Harper's sprawled form on the floor. "I leave you two alone for a couple of minutes and now you're trading punches? What the fuck is going on here!"

A purpling bruise was already darkening on Harper's face as Francis pulled him to his feet. "Nothing," Harry replied, meeting Harper's incredulous look with a carefully shuttered gaze. "It's all been sorted out now."

Green light flashed past Harry's ear.

Harry whirled around to face the darkened corner of the warehouse, dropping to one knee and drawing his wand, a spell already illuminating the end. Yellow light arced over his head from Jones' return fire. Another jet of light answered from the corner, green spell splashing off the floor and Harry released his curse. A masked and cloaked Death Eater dropped to the ground from the shadows, blood pooling out of the gash in his throat. The whole thing couldn't have taken more than four seconds.

"Where did he come from?" Harry muttered, frantically casting his senses out around him. The sleet and snow cut so far down on his senses he might as well be blind. He'd never even sensed the Death Eater, let alone his hexes.

"Harry…" There was a strange note in Jones's voice.

Harry turned around and found Harper's limp form crumpled on the dusty floor again, eyes wide and glazed, mouth halfway open like he was just about to say something.

Jones blinked back at him, startled, the beginnings of fear flitting across his face.

It took Harry a moment to realize that Harper wasn't breathing, that the wounded keening and the soft spatter of someone's insides dripping from their gut was coming from Francis, and that the popping noise in his ears wasn't firecrackers or the sound his knuckles made when he clenched his fists, but the sounds of multiple Death Eaters Apparating into the warehouse around him.

And then there was a flare of light behind them.

And Jonesy's head came off at his shoulders.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008**

**T: 1348 hours**

At almost twenty-eight years old, this wasn't where he'd expected to end up.

Harry couldn't say that he'd had some elaborate life planned out for himself – normal family, normal job, normal _life_. For a kid who grew up in the cupboard under the stairs, those were high aspirations. Normal was a concept, a philosophy, an ideal that was a bit like the Holy Grail in that you could discuss it all you wanted, but at the end of the day, it was just another theory from somebody else's imagination. It was never really his. And somewhere along the way, he'd stopped wanting these things, stopped believing in these things, stopped dreaming of having them for himself.

Maybe it started when he was sixteen and he'd just experienced the first rush of fear and adrenaline that came with the hot gush of somebody else's lifeblood over his hands.

Maybe it started when he was seventeen, flush full of anger and raw with it when the Department of Mysteries set its ultimatum: join us or be declared a murderer with a warrant for his arrest and a bounty on his head.

Or maybe it was when he was twenty and he'd just watched Dumbledore's limp form topple to the ground, the sinking feeling of dread swooping through his stomach along with the surety that things were going to get much, _much_ worse.

Harry didn't know when it was that he'd stopped living and started just going through the motions.

But he was fairly sure it had started long before everything fell apart.

He kept firing his Berretta in the melee until the magazine clicked empty.

Someone flung a killing curse at his chest. Harry slid sideways, lethal spell flying past him and into the Death Eater coming up behind him.

His shout of alarm abruptly cut off.

Whirling, Harry ducked an entrails-expelling curse and jabbed his wand at the Death Eater. The wizard's howl of pain ended in a bloody gurgle as his ribs splintered, bone shards perforating his lungs.

A misty purple curse arced through air and Harry flung himself backwards out its way. He rolled to his feet, wakizashi in one hand, wand in the other, and sliced the fucker from belly to neck. Harry thrust the corpse into the path of a skin-shredder hex.

Turning, mangled corpse falling from his grasp, Harry sent a jet of acid into the sea of black robes. They screamed, skin smoking where it hit.

His spine prickled in warning and Harry hit the ground, yellow curse-light flying a finger's width past his head to splash against the side of the warehouse.

Air whistled above him. Harry leapt aside, a steel beam from the warehouse's ceiling blossoming in the ground where he had lain.

He snarled, lunging at a Death Eater stupid enough to get within arms reach, and neatly slit his throat, blade passing deep enough to grind against bone. A killing curse brushed past him and he damn near felt dizzy at the siren call of death.

Harry spat a flat, guttural word in German and the Death Eater's head spun around twice before popping off his neck with a sound like a cork leaving the bottle.

The head rolled to a stop in between him and the remaining Death Eaters; mask long gone, the head showed plain, mousy features and a long, pointed nose.

"Back off!" A woman's barked into the silence. "He's going to kill us all if we don't wait for reinforcements!"

The Death Eaters stilled, wands extended, latent power still humming in the air.

Harry watched them warily as he waited for the next wave of attack, his adrenaline flowing high and bright, magic singing in his veins. They stood in a semi-circle thirty paces away, bone-white masks gleaming in the shadows like ghosts. Nobody bothered to pick up the dead and the wounded.

Then there was a groan of metal bending in on itself from above and everyone looked up.

The metal supports buttressing the ceiling began to vibrate, metal shivering on metal. A bend appeared in the ceiling, roof bowing to kiss the ground and then the walls began to shudder as well.

The warehouse was coming down.

Shit _fuck._

It was one of those stopgap moments in life, where everything went still and you felt as if _you_ were moving in normal time, but everyone else was on pause like someone had stopped the film halfway through.

When it came down to it, Harry never expected to die out here. Oh sure, he'd pursued death whole-heartedly, but he'd never really believed it. Survive enough fantastical shit, and suddenly, you start to accept the stories as truth; so sure of your own immortality, that reckless, indestructible feeling rubbing against your insides – you start to believe you're untouchable.

Invincible.

_Unconquerable_.

Pride always did come before a fall.

Harry hit the warehouse door running.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008 **

**T: 1740 hours**

Fucking snow.

The cold seeped into his aching wounds, making his joints feel creaky and inflamed with pain. Warming charms were great and all, but they didn't sink way deep down inside where the bite of winter burrowed its way to the bone.

He'd been making circles for hours, leading the Death Eaters on a merry chase as he tried to muddle his tracks. But whatever they were using to trail him was scarily accurate because he hadn't been able to loose them once.

Fuck, it _had_ to be blood. God knew he'd spilt enough of it all over this damned city. _'I am __**not**__ going to be run into the ground like a fucking animal.'_

"Alright!" he yelled into the white silence. "I give up! You win already!"

Nothing. The world around him was still and cold, snow muting everything save for the soft crunch of ice under his feet.

But Harry knew they were there; his pursuers showed up on his senses like a spotlight in the night. "C'mon! Let's do this before my balls fucking freeze off!"

Harry laughed, voice bouncing off the empty buildings around him. "It's a once in a lifetime opportunity!" he taunted.

There was a flutter of black robes and a white mask in the corner of his vision.

He whirled, wand outstretched, a killing curse on the tip of his tongue.

The sad, sooty scraps of somebody's curtains flapped from the broken window above him.

Glass shattered nearby and Harry turned.

Just in time to take a killing curse to the face.

Dizziness washed over him, the world turning into a miasma of green light. There was a ghostly gurgle of water in his ears, shallow and swift, a current tugging at his knees. It would be easy to lie down and let the chill water of the stream wash him where it willed.

And then there was the taste of ash in the air again, snow beneath his hands and soaking past his heavy armour into the knees of his BDUs.

Air rushed into his throat, mouth hanging open stupidly as he gasped life back into his lungs.

Green light hit him again.

It wasn't a gurgling brook that called him now, but the roar of a river, fast and deep, black water plunging over the side of a cliff to crash against sharp rocks below.

He came back crumpled on the snow this time, grey slush melting into Fatty's overcoat, body convulsing with the need to breathe. Under the snow lay the same muck and building rubble strewn across London. The hard crust of the snowfall didn't do one damn thing to cushion his body. Harry coughed, blood trickling from the side of his mouth and knew his broken rib had finally pierced his lung.

He laughed, the taste of copper slicking the back of his throat. "What do you think, huh?" Harry struggled to his feet, light-headed and careless from the adrenaline rush of coming back to life again. "Maybe the third time's the charm," he said as he stood, wobbling on shaky legs.

White masks peered out of the ruins around him, wands drawn, but they were still, frozen with shock.

"What, no takers?" he wheezed, grinning through the haze of grey in his vision. "You're not afraid, are you?"

Liquid burbled in his airways and Harry doubled over coughing, ribs protesting unhappily. The copper taste was stronger now and snow beneath him was splattered with blood.

He braced his hands on his knees and levied himself upright. The familiar hum of his own magic was rapidly closing in on his location. Taking a page out of the necromancer's book, Harry stalled for time.

"Been following us since La Muerte let loose the Inferi, haven't you?" Harry said, voice still strong despite the rattle in his lungs.

The white masks were silent.

"You burned Neil and the rest alive," he said, remembering the smell of burned flesh and the little burnt briquettes that used to be hands and feet. He'd come across their corpses on one of his circles around the city. Even he felt mildly horrified at what they'd been put through before the blissful mercy of death pulled them under. "Trapped them. Pinned them in like a herd of cattle against the wall. Did you hear how they screamed? How they begged?" Harry glanced around. "Didn't quite sound human, did it?"

A Death Eater, half-hidden behind a hotel doorway, shuffled nervously.

Harry laughed, shaking his head as he stuffed his hands in his pockets. Plastic crinkled under his fingers. "Look at the atrocities you commit. And how many of you have the gall to call _me_ a monster?"

The howl of the winter wolf echoed across the buildings and Harry watched the Death Eaters scramble for cover as his violet-eyed creation ambushed its unfortunate victim, claws outstretched, maw open in a lupine grin. Glass and steel gleamed through a layer of frost as the thing shredded the Death Eater and pounced on another.

Harry began to chant, silver light gleaming in the air around him as his mouth moved soundlessly through a series of incantations.

The trail of blood spattered over the icy road burst into white flame, thick, hazy smoke obscuring the air. Somebody yelped high and panicked as the tracking device containing Harry's blood lit up like a magnesium flare.

Spellfire blasted past his ear.

Harry spun, flinging the plastic snack wrapper into the Death Eater's mask.

The man swatted the thing from the air just in time to catch Harry's killing curse in the face.

Harry waved his wand in the pattern Professor McGonagall had long drilled into his head, murmuring the words to transfigure the wrapper into a lion.

Or, at least he tried to.

The piece of plastic twisted and expanded, growing strong muscular legs and a feline frame. But in the place of tawny hair, grew a thick, luxurious coat of dark grey fur striped with black like a tiger, malachite-green eyes instead of gold, with white tufts on the ears like a lynx.

A new thing with claws and teeth entered the fray and if it weren't for the sharp taste of rime on the air, Harry would write it off as just another one of his transfiguration mishaps.

Recognition sat just out of reach, the creature's name swirling dizzily through his mind, his tongue struck dumb.

It turned and looked at him, green eyes gleaming with intelligence and bloodlust, red streaked over its fur.

Putrid orange light brushed past him close enough to ruffle his hair, drawing him back into the chaos.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008 **

**T: Unknown**

Snow hid all manner of sins.

The pack of angry wizards lay buried under a fresh coating of white.

He'd finally torn the ligament in his injured knee beyond its capability to support him. Harry gave up on struggling to his feet and sat back, sprawled in the snow like a ragdoll.

The grisly sound of tearing meat came from the grey and black creature beside him as it crunched heavy jaws through the meat and sinew of a fallen Death Eater. Black robes lay torn in the snow, the soft, muted colours of his insides spread around the unfortunate fucker and smeared onto Harry himself. A limp hand poked him in the hip and Harry tiredly brushed it away from himself.

The cat took that as an invitation to use it as a chew toy. Bone popped wetly as the thing bit down, a satisfied purr buzzing away in its throat. Harry reached out and scratched the side of its jaw; the happy whirr intensifying as the cat butted its head against his hand in search of more attention. It nipped gently at Harry's skin and curled up at his side as friendly as a housecat, its meal abandoned. Cunning green eyes blinked contentedly, its grey and black striped tail flicking slowly from side to side in satisfaction.

"Hey there puss-puss," Harry mumbled to the animal as he rubbed behind its ears. "Not going to let me go alone, are you?"

There was a piece of rebar lodged in Harry's gut, neatly shish-kabobing him through the abdomen, the corrosive fluids of his internal organs seeping into his belly. Each breath he drew felt like fire. Fever was setting in fast and shock wasn't far behind it.

Harry didn't think his chances for survival were high.

Meltwater soaked his clothes and his skin and Harry wondered if his body had forgotten how to shiver. God, he was so fucking _tired_. His eyelids were as heavy as lead and Harry abruptly dug the fingers of his left hand into an ugly gash on his thigh.

Pain and consciousness shook him awake with the force of a hammerblow and Harry clenched his teeth against the scream rising from his throat.

A rattling click, click, click of steel joints came stalking across the snow; Harry's view of the steel and glass animation pared down to a hulking, chrome-edged menace slinking through the shadows, violet eyes glowing eerie and bright in the evening gloom.

The cat's hackles went up and it hissed at Harry's monstrous animation, soft fur sticking up in a ruff along its spine like a Mohawk.

Copper burbled in his throat and Harry gasped for air.

* * *

**Jan 9, 2008 **

**T: Unknown**

The next time Harry awoke, it was to the feeling of movement, knobbly shards of glass and ragged steel ends jabbing at his skin.

Metal gleamed above him and Harry gradually recognized the underside of his animation's long muzzle. The monster held him curled close, feet dangling over one limb, his head resting on the shoulder of the other as it bounded across the snow in an easy lope. The slight bobbing of his body in the creature's hold aggravated the hole in his gut, a dull acidic burn working its way through him.

Shouting ricocheted inside his skull and Harry closed his eyes against dizzy swirl of the world around him. _'Fuck.'_

"Down," he said, thumping his animation on the shoulder.

The Death Eater reinforcements weren't far behind and the buildings around him were far too familiar for comfort. Maybe four hundred meters ahead lay one of the bunker's hidden entrances.

His animation gently set him down in the snow, steel and glass parts clicking and chirping worriedly. He fought to stay sitting up for a moment, feet gone curiously numb, arms beginning to shake with strain.

Harry's shaking hands loosened the laces of a leather pouch tied to his belt. Large silver marbles spilt across the snow; the meticulously etched runes on the surface of the spheres frosting up immediately in the cold.

Multiple pops of Apparation echoed in every direction.

Blood crept up the back of his throat again and Harry spat it out, a streak of runny red spattered on the muddy slush on the streets. "Go," he said nudging the violet-eyed animation. "Buy me some time."

Muddled words bubbled in his mind. Harry struggled to remember the correct sequence of incantations. His tongue felt too large in his mouth and awkwardly tried to wrap around the foreign syllables.

Pointing his wand at the pile of sliver spheres, he flicked his wrist in a figure eight pattern and _willed_ the damn things to come to life as he ignored the furious shouting from the pack of Death Eaters, the thunderclap of spells bouncing off the ruins around him.

The silver marbles bounced on the snow and rolled into a line like small soldiers standing at attention. The runes glittered with rainbow-hued light, frost melting from them as they began to heat.

A shrill cry of pain echoed in the background and faded into a gurgle, Harry's steel and glass animation screaming with rage.

The snow beneath the spheres turned to water as they spun in place, a high-pitched whine beginning to emanate from their whirling forms.

There was the sound of ruptured metal.

And then nothing.

Harry looked up, high whine of the spheres pulsing in his ears.

Scrap metal lay strewn across the snow, the violet glow gone from his animation's eyes.

The Death Eaters had taken notice of him now; wands pointed at Harry who was still sprawled in the snow. They crowded closer, almost panting with barely restrained fury.

Harry started to laugh, blood dripping messily from his mouth and smearing over his throat and chin.

"Die," he said, dark water gurgling hungrily in his ears. "Die screaming."

Red-orange streaks of light left spots in his vision as the spheres shot off in different directions.

There was a murmur of unrest from those left of the Death Eaters. One bright soul hastily conjured a shield, white mask hanging loose around his neck, dark eyes fixed warily upon Harry.

It didn't fucking matter.

The world exploded in light.


	2. Psychology 101

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter One

Psychology 101

**Date: Unknown**

**T: Unknown**

The hypnotic swirl of dark water untangled its coils from around his mind and Harry came to with a quick, startled inhalation.

Bright light hit his eyes.

For a moment, he was too shocked at being alive to do anything.

Then, half-blinded, furious with adrenaline and panic, Harry found himself on his feet, wand outstretched and humming in his palm.

He blinked the spots from his vision, feeling remarkably well despite the crick in his neck that came from lying on the floor for too long. In fact, there was a distinct _lack_ of pain; no fire seeping into his belly from being gutted alive, no shards of bones that were once his ribs jabbing into his lungs, no tang of blood on his breath. Now, his pulse beat as steady and strong in his veins as a metronome, breath sweet and his lungs whole and hale.

Harry wobbled in place, vertigo almost taking his feet out from under him.

Light streamed in through the window. Harry turned, raising a hand in front of his eyes to ward off the glare, Fatty's overcoat tangling around his ankles. How odd, he thought, for some reason he remembered it hitting a bit below his knees.

It was sunny outside. Sunny like summer, hot and bright with the promise of rain on the wind. Stumbling toward the light, Harry grabbed hold of the sill before he might fall through the open window.

The sky was so blue, so _clean_; no smoke, no acrid stench of dead things and hot metal, no trace of ozone – _dark magic_ – stinging his nostrils. Everything smelled moist and green and fresh. There was a breeze outside and it tasted of sun-warmed tarmac and cut grass and the heat upon his face felt so different from the cold mid-winter night of moments before.

He blinked, wondering if this was like one of those desert mirages, thirst and heat haze drawing an oasis from the sands.

Something metallic roared nearby, the growl rumbling up the side of the room.

Harry flinched at the sound, old instincts clamouring to take hold. He hit the wall, back braced against the side of the window, wand in hand and a spell on the tip of his tongue, black-lacquered wood gone damp with sweat in his grip.

A clunk sounded from the shifting of mechanical components.

Was that…

…a _car?_

Harry peeked around the edge of the sill, eyes wide and stunned as he watched a man in the small cobalt vehicle fumble with something near the gear shift, before backing out of the driveway. The mini-cooper took a left at the end of the street and disappeared around the corner of a well-manicured garden.

Harry gawked.

As far as desert mirages went, this one was really fucking convincing.

He swallowed; sweat dripping down his face as he slowly lowered his wand.

There was something very, _very_ wrong here.

_'Torture?'_ he wondered. _'Is this supposed to be torture? Some clever illusion designed to look like Muggle suburbia so I'll let my guard down?'_

Whoever had created this technique must not have been very bright, because Harry still had both swords, his wand _and_ his Berretta nine with two spare magazines stuffed into his pouch along with his heavy winter robes.

Was it some kind of head game, like Legilimency? A hallucinatory potion, maybe?

The room around him was bare of excess and painted a stark, institutional white, sunlight glancing bright and piercing off the walls. It was Spartan in nature, adorned only with a plywood wardrobe, a desk and chair set, and a small bed that had definitely seen better days. There was a ratty blanket on the bed and a thin pillow, both that dingy grey that only came with age and wear. Beside it was a small pile of textbooks, parchment scraps poking out their tops; _A History of Magic_ by Bathilda Bagshot read the title of one; _1,001 Magical Herbs and Fungi (and where to find them!)_ read another, a fluffy quill and half-finished essay sticking out the side.

These were a schoolboy's books, Harry thought with a perplexed huff of laughter, and a wizard's to boot.

Harry glanced around the room. A Gryffindor banner was pinned up behind the door and a polished broom stood in the corner next to the wardrobe. There was a calendar on the wall, red slashes marked through most of the days. A brass bound trunk lay open at the foot of the bed, black robes spilling over the edge and on top of the wardrobe sat a plain, wrought-iron bird cage with a bag of owl treats sitting beside it.

This was his room. This was his room from Number Four, Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey right down to the very last, half-remembered detail.

Only, it wasn't really his, was it? "His" referred to that rash, teenage-version of himself. The stupid kid of bygone years who was more concerned with silly things like girls and Quidditch and completing his homework. The boy who hardly understood what he was getting into when he accepted his place in Hogwarts.

He may as well have signed his name in the Devil's book of the Damned.

Harry glanced at his hands, stained dark and sticky from where they peaked out of Fatty's too long sleeves.

Oh _nicely_ done. Whoever's idea this was, trapping Harry in 'Number Four' was subtler than he originally thought. Hell of a distraction – make his mind wander and while he strolled along memory lane, they'd suck him under further.

Extending his senses, Harry searched for a flaw in the falsely fabricated world around him. Ran sensory-fingers of thought over the room, trying to find where solidness dissolved into the surrealism of dreams; dancing hippos, neon lights, white masks, and other random tastes and sounds flashing in nonsensical rhythms along his neurons.

Nothing.

They'd gotten smarter since the last time he'd been captured. No cracks in the mind-construct, no little mouse-holes to slip out of, no smooth walls for his mind to bump up against, no telltale sign that there was even a cage meant to contain him.

No way for him to find his way out.

Voices underfoot shattered the pin-drop silence.

Harry jumped, heart pounding in his ears like thunder, shivering even as Fatty's overcoat heated in the – _false_ – summer sunshine coming through the open window. Then there was the muted stomp of heels hitting carpeted stairs and a strident, feminine tone cut through the air. "Harry Potter!" the voice shrilled, a hand knocking sharp and loud on the door. "_Don't_ you _dare_ think you'll be sleeping in all day."

He twitched, eyes darting over the room for cover, pulse pounding in his throat. His mind scrabbled at the walls around him, struggling for some way to turn the room into a dense forest of trees, branches twisting to hide his thought-form from searching eyes. Cold panic stung the back of his throat, so close like the snow he imagined underfoot, but the room remained stubbornly fixed in place.

The doorknob rattled. "Get up!"

"Petty," came another voice from below, this one starched, ostentatious, and definitely male. "Do you need a hand with the boy?"

Harry froze, stunned disbelief gluing his feet to the floor.

'Petty?' he mouthed. Pet_unia?_ As in _**Aunt**__ Petunia?_

"Oh _Fuck Me_!" he breathed.

"I beg your pardon!" said a woman from the open doorway. Harry whirled and dropped to a crouch, palm finding the Berretta nine holstered under his left arm, wand tucked out of sight.

The thing imitating Petunia glared at him, blue eyes sparking with anger, wheat-blonde hair pulled back from its face with a gold barrette. "I _will not_ have that kind of language in my house!" Thin nostrils flared as it inhaled, pink spots of hectic indignation forming high on its cheeks. "Is that perfectly clear?"

Harry flicked off the strap holding the weapon in place, waiting for the thing's face to distort and turn into the white mask of a Death Eater. Or worse, for its mouth to fall open in a smile, growing wider and wider until its skin split at the seams, jaw yawning into an Inferi's vacant-eyed leer of hunger.

He went still, hand poised upon his weapon and ready to draw.

Its lip curled, picture perfect imitation of Petunia Dursley. "_What_ have you _smeared_ – " It said the word with a shudder, like it could actually taste the mess coating Harry's form on its tongue. "– all over your face? If you've been practising your freakishness in this house, I promise you, there will be hell to pay."

Not-Petunia spun on one tall, expensive heel and stomped her way out of the room, peach-coloured dress swishing about her calves. "And go take a shower," it barked at him over her shoulder. "You smell like death warmed over."

The door slammed behind her, bouncing back open from the force of her swing.

Oh what to do, what to do...

Harry silently slipped out the door.

He prowled down the hallway from the recreated model of his room at Number Four. The house was almost a _perfect_ reincarnation of his memories, but warped just subtle enough to throw his perceptions off and make him feel seasick. It was like being stuck in a carnival funhouse with the crazy mirrors and furniture nailed to the ceiling. The doorknobs and windows were set higher than they should be, the floor too close like one of those goofy 3D films where shit popped out of the screen at you.

Harry shuddered, nausea rolling about in his belly. This was weird. They left him his weapons, but paid a hell of a lot of attention to the insignificant details of the scene. Someone's priorities were a little fucked up.

The stairs creaked beneath his weight in the exact same pattern as before Privet Drive became ash and embers. An imitation Dudley sat enthralled by the chattering telly, brilliant colours flickering seizure-quick across the screen. Not-Dudley didn't even notice him, which was a fairly accurate approximation of his real cousin's self-absorbed personality.

Full points for that Death Eater's portrayal.

Harry stepped into the kitchen, the ugly oriental carpet changing to white linoleum.

Petunia stood in the kitchen, rubber gloves covering her hands to her elbows as she washed dishes, Brillo pad scritch-scratching at a particularly stubborn spot of grease. She was oblivious to Harry as he stood behind her, the Berretta nine in hand and braced to fire. There were so many silencing spells scrawled along the barrel of the weapon, he could put two rounds in her head, walk over to the fat-ass on the couch, put two rounds in _his_ head – and no one would be the wiser. Or maybe he'd slide up behind her and cut her throat. Snicker-snack and then it'd all be over.

Not that easy, though. Never that easy.

The Death Eaters thought wrong if they believed Petunia's face would temper Harry's wrath, his hate. Bloodlust was riding him so hard right then, he was dizzy with it; rage sinking low enough in his belly it felt like arousal.

Forks and knives clattered together in the sink.

Harry took another step forward, a beam of light from the kitchen window passing over his face. He was less than three feet behind Not-Petunia and she had no fucking idea, couldn't even hear the sound of his breathing, let alone Fatty's coat brushing against his ankles over the water running in the sink.

The gun gleamed as black as sin in the sunlight, its presence just as alien an anomaly as Harry in Not-Petunia's well-ordered kitchen.

He stilled, weapon aimed at the back of her head.

"Mum!"

Harry whirled to face the doorway at the sound of Not-Dudley's cry from the other room, the Berretta nine hidden near his shoulder holster, but his hands were shaking and the holster was sliding all over the place, the worn leather gaping funny in the shoulders, he couldn't get a hold of the damn thing –

"Mum, the telly's gone all fuzzy!"

Then there was a shrill, airy yelp from behind him and Harry twisted to find Not-Petunia staring at him from way too close, like she'd turned from the sink while simultaneously taking a step forward at Dudley's whine. She leaned back from him, one sopping rubber glove braced over her heart. If her eyes got any wider, they might roll out of her head and onto the floor.

"Mum!"

Not-Dudley had gotten up from the couch and was clomping his way towards the kitchen, clueless as usual to the world around him.

"Who are _you_?" asked Not-Dudley in a petulant voice.

Tilting his head, Harry stared.

Dudley fucking Dursley peered at him from just outside the doorway.

Or, at least it looked like his cousin.

Harry turned to face the Death Eater.

He'd heard a story about cooking frogs once during a patrol a few years back. How when placed in boiling water, they'd jump back out, but when placed in cool water, the frogs would sit croaking and bumping about the bottom of the pot while the water temperature rose ever higher around them. He wondered how long it'd take for Not-Dudley to realize how warm the water was.

Harry moved slow and smooth, sidled right up beside the Death Eater like the serpent in the Garden. Not-Dudley took a hesitant step backward and Harry began to circle him, sliding loose-limbed and soundless over the carpet around the Death Eater's bulk. It _was_ a good imitation of a young Dudley Dursley. Right down to the pudge of belly creeping over his belt and his heavy, open-mouth breathing, the buttery stink of fat-sweat clinging to his Muggle clothes.

The thing flinched. "What are you doing?"

Harry clicked his tongue in disappointment as the impersonator whirled around in circles to follow him. "Fat, fat, fatty," he rasped, grinning as the Death Eater flushed red with anger.

"I'm not fat!" the impersonator bellowed, face turning splotchy with rage.

"Don't talk to it, Dudley!" said Not-Petunia with growing alarm. She'd backed up against the kitchen counter, eyes darting towards the door and away, skittering over Harry's form like she couldn't quite accept his presence as real. "That's not your cousin anymore."

"Of course not," Harry purred. "Nice costume, by the way. Very realistic." He held up his hand in the A-okay gesture and gave Not-Dudley an exaggerated wink. "Got my fat-ass cousin down to a T."

The thing's fists clenched, doughy face purpling like a pig's; a short, roly-poly Vernon with Vernon's shitty sense of humour.

Harry laughed low and throaty. Who'd be faster? The Death Eater in disguise? Or himself, riding the adrenaline rush from the promise of spilled blood? "Are you going to hit me?" His smile widened, more teeth than mirth showing now. "Hurt me until I tell you all of my secrets?"

Not-Dudley's eyes widened from their piggish squint. "Harry?" he breathed. The impersonator stared wide-eyed from the sludge caked on Harry's boots and streaked on Fatty's coat all the way to the blood drying stiff and spiky in his hair. "What did you do to yourself?"

"_Don't talk to it, Dudley!"_ Petunia shrieked, almost crawling up onto the counter to get away from Harry.

Her scream hit a crescendo when Harry abruptly pointed the Berretta nine at her. "Shut your flapping maw," Harry snarled. "Goddamned blithering bint."

Sweat dripped down Not-Dudley's face. "That's not real," he stuttered, eyes fixed on the sleek weapon in Harry's hands. "That's just a toy."

"Sure it is," Harry agreed, teeth still bared in that terrible caricature of a grin. "Check this out, Dudders. Look right up here," he drawled in a voice as slow as molasses, bringing his hands up like in prayer, tapping the space between his eyes with the cold barrel of the gun. "Look at my scar. Hideous fucking thing, isn't it?"

The Death Eater stupidly followed the glint of sunlight travelling up the line of the weapon until he met Harry's eyes.

Fast as a snake, Harry's Legilimency reached out and sank its fingers into the Death Eater's mind, pushing at the walls of Not-Dudley's brain for the key to his cage.

His cousin howled with pain, blood dripping from his nose as he screamed, hands pressed to the sides of his skull.

Lights.

Colour.

Sound.

_Oh God, oh God..._

He hadn't even registered that his back had hit the wall, or that his legs had crumpled underneath him or that his ass had met the floor in a tangled heap of limbs and bloodstained overcoat.

Dudley Dursley took off towards the stairs at a speed Harry wouldn't have believed of him if he hadn't just been faced with undeniable proof that Not-Dudley was in fact his cousin. Fat, sloppy, slobby Dudley Dursley in the fucking flesh. Live and kicking.

Emboldened, Petunia lunged at the sink and seized a metal spatula. She let out a high, strangled cry and flung it at Harry, taking a chip out of the drywall above his head.

"_Get out!"_ she screamed, thrashing against the counter where her dress was caught on the lip of the sink. The flat murmur of tearing cloth echoed through the kitchen and Petunia – _Aunt Petunia_ – jackknifed off the counter, hard enough she almost landed on her hands and knees. "Get out of my house, you _freak_!"

Harry stood, someone else at the helm of his body, and jerkily began to make his way to the stairs, feet shuffling across the carpet. Something grabbed hold of Fatty's overcoat and Harry tilted his head to the side to see what it was, boneless with disbelief.

Petunia tightened her grip on his collar and shook him vigorously. "You _bad _boy!" she admonished him like Marge would her bulldog when it piddled on the carpet, a finger wagging under Harry's nose. "_Bad, __**bad**__ boy!_ We take you in and this is how you repay us? Get _out!_"

In a surprising feat of strength, she started hauling him back towards the front door, the intent to throw him out written clear as day in the furious pink flush on her face.

Harry left the ratty collar of Fatty's overcoat in her hand as he took the stairs two at a time, angry protests following behind him.

Fatty's overcoat tangled around his ankles and Harry tripped over its trailing hem, momentum carrying him into the wall. Picture frames clattered to the ground around him as he struggled to his feet, shoulder beginning to throb unhappily.

"Look at what you've done!" howled Petunia, blonde wisps springing free from her immaculate hairstyle. She looked haggard and crazed, the thin hollows of her cheeks stark with fury.

Harry felt cool metal under his hand and twisted the doorknob. His room again, too small, too bright, too white; he crossed the room in three long strides he had no memory of taking and ripped the calendar from the wall, hands shaking bad enough that he almost dropped the damn thing.

**1993**, it read in large bold letters across the top. **July 17****th****, 1993**.

"Bullshit!" Harry bit out with a snarl.

There was an angry squawk from his doorway, but Harry ignored it.

Something unnameable welled up inside, something that was one part fury, one part panic, and one part a soundless, mindless roar screaming in his hind-brain to _fightfightfightfightfight..._

Dudley's door opened with a tentative creak, the heavy sound of his footsteps muffled against the carpet.

Harry let go of the calendar, loose pages spilling over his boots in a whisper-fall of paper.

"What are you waiting for?" Petunia demanded. "Pack your things and _go_!"

His hands fell on the railing of the old bed frame and shifting his weight, Harry swung it around against the far wall, mattress, pillow, blankets, books and all, hitting the floor.

He swallowed past a lump in his throat, a curious sense of apprehension welling up inside his chest.

Maybe the prophecy was right. Maybe neither _could_ live while the other survived – Voldemort half-dead and Harry half-mad.

The chair followed the bed across the room.

"Stop it, _stop it!_ What are you doing?" Petunia shrieked from the doorway, her son peaking fearfully out from behind her.

Harry wrapped his hands around the smooth leg of the desk and whipped it around at the doorway, parchment and ink flying off in different directions.

Petunia screamed.

The desk splintered against the doorway, gouging a long scrape in the drywall. One of the legs flew off and hit the wall of pictures across from Harry's doorway. Frames fell off the wall, the corner of one bouncing off Dudley's skull with a meaty **thwock**. Harry snatched the cracked inkwell from the floor, ink dripping from his hand and hurled it at Petunia just as the woman looked up.

Glass shattered against the wall.

Black ink spattered both Dudley and Petunia, glass shards littering the carpet by their feet.

Calm and damn near serene with it, Harry picked up one of the broken-off legs from the desk. Nodding to himself, he turned and with a perfect swing, began beating the shit out of the wardrobe.

The leg splintered on the eighth swing.

Harry dropped it on the floor, magic sparking under his fingers like static electricity; the edges of Fatty's coat beginning to smoke, cracks spider-webbing through the windowpanes and the plaster on the walls as the house groaned and swayed around them

"I'd like to be alone now, please," he said, calmly staring Petunia in the eye.

"If you think – " Petunia started, white-faced and shaking.

"Go away," Harry said in a low growl, his words laced with the same dark power sparking through his veins as was screaming in his brain, murder humming under his skin. The ceiling above Petunia's head cracked, powdery bits of plaster sprinkling down on her hair like dust.

Survival instincts must have kicked in, because his cousin turned and stumbled down the hallway towards the stairs. Petunia grabbed onto his arm, a strange little whimper caught in her mouth, her tidy blonde hair tumbling down from her hair-clip. Dudley didn't stop at the front door, dragging her easily outside and down the walk with his bulk.

The window behind him shattered, glass spraying everywhere. A strong wind came through the broken window and slammed the door shut hard enough to rattle the walls.

Harry floated on the edge of this manic high, desperately wanting to believe this was the prelude to some elaborate torture trap, that this was only the figment of a mind broken by stress and failed suicide. He'd declared his prospects dull and nil, stamped his passport out of the land of the living, thumbed his nose at his enemies, and flat-lined before the explosives finished going off.

There shouldn't have even been enough of Harry Potter left over to piece together and perform psychic lobotomies on. He remembered that last, shuddering breath as his eyelids slid shut; the oncoming roar rushing in his ears before his parting gift shattered the surrounding mile.

But this was undeniably, _unequivocally_ real.

Not a hallucination or dream or head game.

This was real and he had died. As in dead and fucking _gone_. Death was...

He couldn't remember.

Oh sure, he remember _dying_ in all of its Technicolor horror, but death itself?

_Drifting along, caught in the current of a deep, dark river, black water flowing around him as he bumped into other souls trapped in the same waterways... _

Harry's head throbbed, heavy pressure pulsing behind his eyes and buzzing about his skull.

How did he get here? _How the fuck did he get __**here**__?_

He scrubbed at his face with both hands. Caught in a numb loop of disbelief, Harry began to pick out all of the small details his subconscious had blocked out of recognition.

A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles lay near the window where the desk had stood, the lenses shattered, tape holding the nosepieces together. The end of a holly and phoenix feather wand stuck out from the wardrobe where it had rolled and one of the essays spread out across the glass and ink-spattered floor had his fucking _name_ written across the top in the wide, sloppy handwriting from his youth.

_**Harry Potter, year 3, The Theory of Inanimate Transfiguration.**_

Harry couldn't seem to catch his breath. Air whistled uselessly in and out of his lungs as an unfamiliar emotion wormed its way up through his chest.

He laughed, wheezing and gasping for breath, the wall of stubborn, wilful denial growing thin and shattering like the glass on the floor. He wasn't crying, not really. It was stupid, because he'd attended hundreds of funerals and buried half as many friends and for all of that he hadn't been able to make his body cry. Now though, now when the sorrow had grown old and scabbed over and with the looming probability of having to do it all over again, now the waterworks came. It was selfish and childish and Harry couldn't make himself stop. He stuffed a fist in his mouth to keep the mad howl of hysterical laughter from bubbling over, biting down on his knuckles until he tasted blood.

It made him wonder what would happen if he stuck the Berretta nine in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Go up and see how close he could stand to that ugly, empty edge of oblivion.

Would he hear the bang? Or would it be over with before he could feel his consciousness splatter against the walls?

The weapon was heavy and solid in his hands. It was even heavier in his mouth, bitter tang of gun oil bursting across his tongue, the steel skin-warm and growing warmer. He flipped the safety off, pressing his finger against the tension in the trigger.

If two killing curses and handful of sorcery-fuelled pocket bombs didn't work, why would a bullet be that much more effective? Maybe if he emptied the whole magazine into his brainpan, maybe he wouldn't have time to come back again after each one. Maybe he'd stay dead this time.

Harry pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked empty, the sound rattling through his teeth and into his skull.

Confused, Harry ejected the magazine and stared dumbstruck.

There were five rounds left in the magazine. And he was sure, that if he looked, he'd find another jammed in the Berretta nine.

The realization of what he'd done – what he'd _almost_ done – hit him and a giggle slipped out sideways. Harry barely had time to lunge for the trash can next to the desk before his meagre meal of beef jerky crawled up the back of his throat. Knee-jerk reflex kept him gagging long past the point where his stomach was empty and bile was the only thing coming up, peppery acid burning the soft flesh of his mouth.

Harry wiped his face on Fatty's sleeve with a muttered, "Fuck!"

'_Please no. Please, __**please**__ – don't make me do this again. I may have been born a child of violence, but please, don't do this to me. Don't make me live this again. I can't do this anymore –'_

He cut that train of thought off before it could devolve into the mad gibbering whirling around in the back of his mind.

The taste of bile still sat thick and nauseating in his throat. Grabbing the corner of an oversized shirt crumpled on the floor, Harry wiped his face with it, smearing a mixture of blood, greasepaint, ink and mucus on the wrinkled cotton. Some people could cry and look strong and cool while doing it, single tears of manly pain trickling from their eyes.

Harry wasn't one of them. He just got blotchy with snot dripping everywhere.

Where do you go from here? Harry stared at the damage he'd wrought on his old room at Number Four, Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey.

The cheap bed frame was cracked down the middle and when Harry flipped it right side, the damn thing came apart in four different pieces, raw edges bare and splintered.

Muttering blue-tinged curses under his breath, Harry dragged the mattress free of the wreckage and peeled off the glass-studded sheets. Using the sheets as a crude broom, he cleared the floor of most of the glass, kicking aside the rest of the mess. Hedwig's cage, his trunk, and broomstick joined the mattress. The back of the chair had broken off, leaving a battered, but functional stool behind.

His old wand lay abandoned under the wardrobe. Harry crouched down to get a better look at it.

Holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches, nice and supple, the wand was a warm memory of yesteryear when magic was still newfound and wondrous. He picked up a thick shard of glass and used it to roll the wand towards him.

His original wand was destroyed early on in the war. He'd been seventeen and still blind to how many people had an eye on him. During a minor skirmish, he'd tried a tricky bit of dark magic meant to turn his opponent inside out; one badly parried curse later and Harry fudged the spell, his wand dissolving into a handful of singed splinters.

Its replacement was a weapon designed to channel pure, unadulterated destruction. The wand held no fancy titles; no grave warning; no dire prophecy. It was just a tool, simple and efficient, and it fit Harry's hands like a dream.

The holly wand lay quietly on the floor in front of him. Harry wondered what it would feel like to hold it. Would it still feel hot in his palm, with its soft hum of power and the sense-memory of phoenix song vibrating in his ears?

Harry found himself reaching for the wand without realization and he jerked back, off-balance enough to land on his ass again.

He laughed. Once a fool, always a fool.

He didn't know if he could even get the holly wand to spark anymore. Not after he'd wielded the other and Harry wasn't dumb enough to try and find out, especially when there was a good chance the Trace was very much live and kicking.

Snagging the edge of an ugly old dress-shirt hanging out of the wardrobe, Harry dropped it over the wand. He wrapped the fabric around the length of wood and tossed it onto the mattress, sick of the memories the thing brought up.

The house was silent below him. Dudley and Petunia were long gone.

Fatty's overcoat was stiff with drying fluids and it smelled like the hobos Harry used to cross the street to avoid when he was younger. He peeled the coat off, wadding the thing up into a tight ball before tossing it onto the pile of broken glass. His t-shirt underneath was soaked with a pungent combination of sweat and blood and damn near glued to his skin. Removing his Berretta, he checked the safety and carefully set the weapon on the mattress, dropping his shoulder rig beside it.

Harry fumbled at the buckles of his armour for a moment; fingernails so caked with crud that it was a struggle to get a hold of the sturdy clasps, before finding the catch and shrugging out of the heavy dragonhide. Tiny runes winked in the light where they were stitched into the soft lining with silver-gilt thread. Unbuckling his sword belt, Harry placed the blades next to his shoulder holster and made a mental note to clean them later so the steel wouldn't rust. He propped his foot up on the chair and began working at the buckles on his leg armour on autopilot, shucking off the thick, double-layered dragonhide on his thighs; shin-guards and knee-bracers going onto the mattress next to the rest.

Everything was so _loose_ on his frame that Harry dreaded finding out how much he'd shrunk in size, his feet swimming in boat-sized boots. Thirteen was a very fuzzy recollection in his memory. He remembered the some of the highlights, but the exact details were lost to time.

Kicking his boots off into the corner, Harry snagged a pair of sweats and a fresh shirt out of the trunk and wandered out of the room.

The hallway carpet was scratchy and ornate; a quasi-oriental design meant more for appearances than comfort to match the dark wood of the baseboards and the dusky rose-coloured walls. Pictures of a fat blond boy with an even fatter man dotted the hallway floor. Petunia's son favoured her colouring but definitely _not_ her build.

He stopped in front of the large family portrait, the glass cracked across the face of the photograph.

If he remembered right, then this particular picture was from the summer before his third year.

Both Petunia and Vernon were seated in this photograph, Vernon's bulk comically out of proportion with his wife's frailty. Vernon wore a proud, self-important grin, eyes squinting in the fat, Buddha rolls of his face. Petunia, in contrast, had on a very thin, hard sort of smile, almost a smirk. Dudley stood in the middle of this picture with his hands placed on both of his parents' shoulders, a wide, pasted-on grin matching his father's.

Harry had only ever been in one family picture. He'd been six and Mrs. Figg couldn't take him as she'd been off her feet with the flu.

Each year, the Dursleys got together for a family photo. Sometimes Marge and her favourite bulldogs were in it, sometimes not. Usually not. That year, six-year-old Harry had the dubious pleasure of being stuffed into the backseat with his far larger cousin for an hour and a half as Vernon drove in circles round the city, searching for a parking spot near the photographer's London studio.

Only the best would do for Petunia Dursley.

Harry patiently stuck out the ride next to his screaming cousin who had taken it upon himself to kick the back of the seat in his tantrum. Once there, Petunia dragged Harry out by the ear and deposited him next to the vehicle, choosing instead to fawn over her squalling brat of a child.

He hadn't minded too much. The less notice Petunia took of him, the less she would find to pick at.

The studio itself was a fascinating experience. Harry had never seen a camera before, save for stolen glimpses at the telly. And like most six-year-olds, he'd gotten distracted. He'd wandered off.

That was his first mistake.

His second was in asking one of the assistants: "Please help me find my family."

'Don't draw attention to yourself' was the mantra Petunia Dursley had drilled into his head. 'I don't want to know you're even there' was the other.

Harry had defied both in a matter of minutes.

And while the photographer's pretty assistant was cooing over his 'lovely green eyes', a heavy hand had clamped down onto his arm and abruptly spun him around to face the furious visage of Vernon Dursley.

The man had been in such a towering rage that he hadn't said a word, but Harry didn't have to be a genius to know he was in serious shit. The photographer's assistant followed them back to the room where Petunia was rigidly perched on the edge of a stool holding a fussy Dudley on her lap.

"Such a sweet child," she'd said to Petunia, "so quiet, too."

"He was my sister's son," Petunia had stiffly replied.

_Was._ He _was_ my sister's son.

'But not now,' Harry had heard in those words at the early age of six. 'He doesn't belong to anyone anymore and he's certainly not _mine_.'

He hadn't any delusions about the Dursleys after that.

The Dursleys weren't family. They weren't ever going to be family. And it didn't matter how hard he tried to please them because they didn't want him. He was an orphan and like all orphans, he should be grateful for whatever charity people deigned to give him because everyone else had families of their own and couldn't be bothered to take on somebody else's leftovers. There was no miracle family waiting in the wings for their lost son.

The finished photo had gone up on the wall; his Aunt and Uncle's smiles stilted and visibly fake, Dudley having passed out in Petunia's arms and looking like a snoozing beach ball dressed in a blazer and tie, Vernon's hand gripping Harry's shoulder a little too tight as he stood by his Uncle's chair.

Harry had spent a week in the cupboard under the stairs for that incident.

The picture came down three months later, Petunia claiming that the picture was blurry in the corner and wanted it redone.

Harry knew better now. Petunia had gotten sick of looking at his sad, lost expression because it made her feel something she normally didn't when it came to her sister's son.

Guilt.

In a pique of rage, Harry seized the picture frame and flung it down the stairs as hard as he could. The frame hit the front door with a musical shatter of glass. He couldn't say it made him feel any better, but he felt a little less like he was going to crawl out of his own skin and run screaming down the street.

Harry ignored the other photos scattered on the floor as he made his way past the mess in the hallway.

The upstairs bathroom was painted in the same shade of rose as the hall, floral tile with a ridiculous pink blossom motif patterned across the floor. The tub was pink. The toilet was pink. The sink was pink. The shower curtain was pink. A basket of dried flowers sat to the side of the sink along with a pink razor and toothbrush. Fuchsia towels and a fuchsia floor mat and fuchsia soap – Harry wondered if he should snip his balls off and leave them by the door on the way in. Even the frosted light covers above the mirror were in the shape of drooping tulips.

"Goddamn," Harry announced. "I'd forgotten how fuck-ugly this place was."

He hadn't noticed it on the busy design of the hallway carpet, but his socks were leaving little red footprints on the tile. For a moment, Harry thought he'd cut his foot on the glass strewn through the hall. Then, taking a closer look, he realized that his socks and the hems of his combats were still damp with blood and melted snow seeping down towards the pull of gravity.

The half-mad giggle tried to slip out again and Harry grit his teeth against the sound rising in his throat.

"Here and now, Potter," he mumbled to himself. "Here and now."

He twisted the water on all the way to hot, steam immediately fogging up the mirror. Harry stripped his stinking BDUs off and left them in a messy pile by the door. There was a pair of knives strapped to his ankles, his wand still holstered on his left forearm.

Harry dropped the knives by the edge of the tub, carrying his wand into the shower and setting it on the windowsill, foggy glass damp and dripping.

Rusty streaks of filth trailed down the drain, pale skin turning red under water too hot to be comfortable. He tried desperately not to look at his bony knees and skinny ankles, everything gone thin and boyish again where there had been lean, hard muscle before.

As a child, he'd been bird-boned and small, all baby face and big eyes like a porcelain doll. Delicate, Pomfrey had unthinkingly called him, which was total bullshit because he'd learned how to throw a proper punch at the age of eight, had one hell of a left hook by nine, and earned a spattering of ropey scars across his knuckles proving so by the time he was ten. Dudley may have been a bully, but Harry could give as good as he got twice over.

The two of them butted heads more often than not when they were younger, 'Harry Hunting' and fistfights tapering off sharply after Harry started Hogwarts. He hadn't been around enough to keep up with the animosity between them. Not like his cousin could blame mysterious bruises on Harry after that and in Dudley's typical lazy fashion, he and his posse moved on to easier prey.

He shut off the water before he could boil himself alive. Got dressed before he could get too good a look at his young body, that damn giggle trying to creep up on him.

Reaching up – _up_, fuck, he hadn't had to reach _up_ in _**years**_ – Harry swiped his hand through the steam on the mirror, glass wet and ice cold on his palm.

There was a stranger in the mirror.

Oh sure, that was his nose, his chin, his mouth, his jaw line. Those were his eyes. Those were his cheekbones and eyebrows and ears. But he didn't recognize the expression, not on _this_ face at least. It was too flat, too remote; it was like looking at a marble statue and only the eyes glittered with life, the gleam of malice and the manic edge of rage in the acid-green shine of his irises.

He tried a smile in the mirror and a feral flash of teeth – a hyena's grin – popped up instead.

Harry ran his hands over his features, trying to match the face of his not-quite-right doppelgänger in the mirror with the face of his hazy memories.

At twenty-seven, almost twenty-eight, he'd been a little over six feet and roughly twelve stone. Still on the wrong side of slim, but he'd carried a deceptive bulk of muscle that served him well in close quarters combat.

At thirteen, well, he'd looked like he was thirteen: thin and short. Harry had never been blessed with a face that could pass for older than it was. In fact, he'd always looked a year or two _younger_ than his actual age.

He was different this time around, a little thicker through the neck, a little wider in the shoulders and a little taller than he remembered being around thirteen or fourteen years old. Harry consciously knew all of these features as bits and pieces of himself, but not as a single form he could put his finger on a chart and say, 'This is how I was when I was this-many-years-old.' It was like he was trying to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, starring his face as the tail and his memories as the ass. Someone had put him back together like a puzzle – only they hadn't used all of the pieces from the same set, deciding instead to pick and choose from different scenes what they wanted and what they didn't. An eye from this set, a hand from that one, and an ankle from another.

A pale, hard line of scar tissue travelled the contour of his cheekbone and into his hair. That was from a flesh-eating hex when he was twenty-five. There was another trailing over his chin from eight months ago; he'd fallen from the crumbling edge of a building and been lucky not to break any more bones than he had then. The skin around the hand the necromancer had cut off was covered in purple scars, though the curse was long gone. He'd noticed another scar in the shower; the one where a rampaging dragon had nearly torn his leg off at the knee when he was twenty-two, ropey white scars trailing up and down his shin and thigh.

A dark curl of ink peeked up over his shirt collar on his back, the edge of a thestral's wing and a stylised twist of ivy; the products of too much time spent moody and brooding when he was eighteen. The tail of a chimera poked out of his shirtsleeve and the lonely shadow of a hawk, wings flared against the wind, hovered over his elbow – twenty-three and damn near mad with grief, just wanting something to prove that there had been someone who cared where there was now only a corpse in the ground and cold sheets on her side of the bed. There was long trail of death dates written on the inside of his forearm, the latter ones scrawled there by Harper wielding a bit of guitar string, his dark head bent over Harry's arm, the dank walls of the bunker closing in around them, generators lub-lub-lubbing in the wing next door, white noise filling his ears…

Harry wiped at his eyes, right hand braced on the counter like he was going to topple over otherwise. If he was truly thirteen then the scars, the ink - which looked really fucking stupid on this gangling child's body, like those cheap lick-n-stick tattoos from vending machines – none of it should be there. Of all the things to follow him in the past, these were the last he wanted to be reminded of. No chance for him to start over with a blank slate, no chance for him to let time and hazy recollection take the rough edges off of his uglier memories.

Steam clogged up his lungs, his breathing gone short and tight. He swallowed past the lump in his throat, uselessly gasping for air around the laugh that kept choking him.

Somewhere amongst all of the misery over the last fifteen years, Harry had taught his heart to grow rocky and inhospitable; as if instead of flesh and blood, he was composed of the spiny backbones of mountain ranges, jagged peaks reaching into the sky where there'd dwelt warm things like hope and love before. It was scary how easily he'd learned to snarl instead of smile. He'd forged himself into something that was both beyond human and subhuman at the same time, and had very little in common with the rest of the world.

And he'd done this at an age where most people were still struggling to figure out who they were and where they fitted into life. Which seemed a silly thing to Harry because he'd never 'fit in'. Not at the Dursley's, not at Hogwarts, not in the midst of the Ministry's happy collection of murderers and rapists and thieves that made up Special Forces. Not even in the last days of the goddamned apocalypse had he fit in.

But humans were pack animals and Harry could no more be blamed for trying to find a pack of his own than a fish could be blamed for swimming.

He did not belong.

The irony inherent was that Harry was an abomination of his own making, carefully nurtured into a monster that could bare teeth as sharp as any other living, breathing nightmare that walked the earth.

It was one of those strange things in life where you wake up in the morning and realize you have no idea who's staring back at you in the mirror. It went beyond the superficial layer of flesh and blood. It was the thing inside, the hungry thing where Harry could eat and eat until he was bloated and sick, but he'd never feel full.

* * *

**July 17th, 1993**

**T: 1238 hours**

The summer storms had moved in quickly that afternoon, blue skies turning sullen and wet.

Harry sat on the steps of the back garden and watched the sky rumble overhead, a cup of hot tea cradled in his hands. He flexed his bare toes in the green, green grass. It was cool and wet beneath his feet, the turned up cuffs of his sweats darkening as they absorbed the light mist falling on the garden. Carefully nurtured variegated flora crawled up the damp wood of the back fence, Petunia's flowers beginning to bloom in the summer warmth.

He'd never had a sanctuary as a kid, like a tree house or maybe an attic hidey-hole. But the back garden with the tea roses and the bushes just big enough to disappear in? It was the closest he'd ever gotten.

The last he knew of Privet Drive, it'd been a burned out shell of a once pristine neighbourhood; a fleeting memory of childhood he hadn't missed when it was gone. The residents had treated him much like the Dursleys with the same sort of absent-minded neglect that characterized most of his childhood. If you didn't look at it, then you didn't have to acknowledge it.

And maybe he'd used that excuse too many times in his own life – If he didn't look at it, didn't think about it, then it wasn't a problem, wasn't something that would affect him when he was at his lowest.

Harry was sorry he had threatened his aunt. Even on his worst days, he'd never loathed her. Too much sad and bad and ugly had happened since his childhood that he hadn't a shred of hatred to spare for his past. Most of what was left over was just pity. Petunia seemed like such a ridiculous caricature now, this woman who would dress up in heels and pearls just to wash the fucking dishes because she thought herself better than her neighbour.

He hadn't thought about these people in so long they might as well be strangers.

His hands shook bad enough that he could see the liquid ripple in the teacup. Harry set the cup down on the step beside him and folded his hands under his chin, elbows braced on his knees.

"I am fucked," he said out loud. "I am fucked in ways I cannot even begin to quantify."

Because, _God_, thirteen? Thirteen was a lifetime ago and it might as well have belonged to someone else. Where did he begin to fix things? Where _could_ he begin?

Harry was beginning to feel like he was stuck in one of those Dali paintings with the dripping clocks.

Well, where had he gone wrong last time around?

He cracked up, ignoring the frenzied edge in his laugh.

Where _hadn't_ he gone wrong?

Spent too much time brooding over the morality of his actions, over the legality of his actions and not enough time actually getting shit done. Spent too much time mourning his friends as they fell and not enough time eradicating their murderers. Spent too much time wallowing eyeballs deep in self-pity and not enough time planning his next move in the war. Spent too much time thinking of himself as a singular entity and not as someone whom others depended on.

Spent too much time thinking he was still the scruffy kid from Number Four, Privet Drive that nobody paid attention to.

_Big Brother's watching you, Harry. And he's been very displeased. _

Murder was still a crime, no matter how justified it was. Special Forces had patted him on the back and in the same breath, condemned him for the very thing they refused to do: clean up the mess of a society that didn't deserve salvation.

_Avoid them at all costs._

What if he couldn't?

"Cross that bridge when it comes to it," Harry muttered out loud to the rainy garden. "I'll wing it if I have to."

There was no way he'd be able to avoid the oncoming war, too. It was too big, too old; Voldemort's First Fall was only a lull in the storm and even then, Tom Riddle was only taking advantage of the situation. It would never matter who led what side: war was on the horizon and thousands were going to die.

Harry was just one man fighting an uphill battle. He wasn't a miracle worker or some kind of prophesised saviour, Trelawney's lunatic ramblings and all. It was madness to think otherwise.

"_Only the dead have seen the end of war._" Harry said under his breath, feeling nothing but contempt as he poured the dregs of his tea out onto the plants beside the steps. "Plato was obviously _not_ a wizard."


	3. Standing Room Only

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Two

Standing Room Only

Shorner wasn't a fan of Marx's work by any stretch of the imagination, but he understood the corollary: If religion was the opiate of the masses, then cynicism was the chosen drug of the enlightened.

The Veil was an age-old conundrum, emphasis on _old_. Although the magic the prehistoric stone arch possessed helped date it back to before the Druids, nobody had been able to pinpoint the exact era of when it was created. The arch was hewn from a type of volcanic rock, and the area from which it was found had not seen seismic activity for thousands of years. It was a striking thing to behold with sharp, stark lines reminiscent of modern minimalism: all shiny and cold and alien. At first glance, the rare obsidian appeared to be more of an ancient artwork than a powerful magical artefact.

The arch had been located in the stone auditorium since 1597, where the Veil was moved from its original location of the Callanish standing stones in the Western Isles of Scotland. Ironically enough, it had been moved without the least bit of knowledge of what "it" really was. The artefact collected a good amount of dust before an unfortunate individual was accidentally knocked into it. And of course, with the typical "not to be seen again."

Speculation said that it was a portal to the Underworld, the entrance to Death's domain, a doorway to different dimensions, with each suggestion getting wilder and crazier than the last. Had the wizards of that time been familiar with twentieth century Muggle culture, they might have called the Veil a 'UFO' of the wizarding world. And in 1688, one bright fellow got the idea that the Veil was a less painful and much more humane way of ridding the world of "unsightly" citizens. Turning into a bit of a morbid tradition, the Veil was used in the execution of criminals and political prisoners for the next hundred and fifty years.

Its original use was unknown, but one key thing had been understood – the Veil was a one-way entrance only. What went in did not come back out.

Until Lord Timonzel Sharr, an amateur scholar from a long and ancient line of wizards, decided to test that theory. In leaving behind his wife and his fourteen-year-old heir, Devon Sharr, Timonzel seemed a foolish and blithely suicidal young man.

Two months after he had entered the Veil, Timonzel Sharr walked out a changed individual, dying three years later in 1901 at the age of thirty-six. Full cause of death remained unknown, though records kept said he suffered from bouts of frothing madness for weeks before his eventual passing. Experimenting with the Veil was left alone after that, and the predecessor of the Department of Mysteries took it over as government property.

So when the Veil went active after a century of sullen respite, Shorner doubted coincidence.

What went in did not come back out.

Which he held as a firm mantra when it came to dealing with the Veil's oddities. Shorner couldn't really count Timonzel Sharr as an aberrance in the pattern, not when the man went mad and died at only thirty-six, which was unusual for such a long-lived race like wizards. The Veil claimed its own and Timonzel was no exception; it just took him longer to die.

The execution chamber had cleared of its earlier hubbub when the Veil went active, displaying unusual vigour for an artefact that was supposed to dormant. Shorner paced the auditorium floor before the dais, listening to the Veil's whispering call rise and desist as he passed near it.

"What connects the dots?" Shorner mused, voice echoing off the stone benches of the chamber.

David North stirred from his sprawl on the stone steps. "Sir?"

Unspeakable David North, a Muggle-raised half-blood, had been recruited directly out of school. A Gryffindor alumnus, North specialized in aggressive transfiguration tactics. What he hadn't stuck on his resume was a knack for tracking charms and a keen eye for patterns or that he'd been caught stalking eight different witches with a _very_ efficient trace network monitoring everything from sleeping and eating to… _extracurricular_ activities.

Given the option between ten months to four years in Azkaban and working for the Department of Mysteries?

Tough choice. Shorner had snatched North's file up almost as soon as it hit the desk. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your Peeping Toms under an un-ironic eye of their own.

"Maybe we're looking at this wrong." Shorner pushed the heavy canvas of his white lab robes back and stuck his hands in his pockets as he surveyed the raised dais with the Veil perched atop. "Maybe it never entered it."

North's eyebrows rose. "I'm not following your train of thought, Sherlock."

Used to his assistant's random Muggle references, Shorner didn't bat an eyelash. "We're all operating under the assumption that whatever came through the Veil had to enter it in the first place."

North whistled dramatically and wiggled his fingers in Shorner's direction.

Ignoring North's antics, Shorner continued his train of thought, things beginning to click into place. "We've collected a magical signature from the spell residue left on the archway, we just can't match it to anyone because nobody saw who entered the Veil and the instruments aren't picking up any anomalies."

He paused, watching as the filmy grey shroud of the Veil drifted in the air like a ghost. "Maybe nobody went in."

"_Something_ came through," replied North as he tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, blonde hair falling out of its messy tail at the nape of his neck. "What if it came from the other side?" He let out a dramatic gasp. "Oh no!"

"What if we're looking in the wrong place?" Shorner mused.

"Wrong place?"

"A magical signature _that_ powerful doesn't go unnoticed around here. Someone else probably caught the foreign magic on their network and they have no idea what they're dealing with."

"Neither do we." North rolled his eyes. "Why are we doing this anyway? Shouldn't the interns be handling something this basic?"

"The Veil is a pet project of mine. All information or anomalies get passed on to me," Shorner replied, distracted by a sudden flash of intuition.

"And?" North asked.

"I want you to check the surrounding trace nets for unidentifiable surges between 0800 and 1100 this morning."

"What are you looking for?"

"I don't know. I don't even know if you'll find anything."

* * *

_The cry of pain was a crow's caw in his ears._

_Seventeen-year-old Harry Potter stumbled over the smoking remains of one rather unlucky wizard slumped across the rubble of a storefront. The scent of cooked meat hung thick and cloying over the place, almost drowning out the hot metal tang of burning things. Broken glass glittered like gemstones on the scorched cobblestones._

_Diagon Alley lay in pieces. The Death Eaters had vanished, having apparated out long before the concussion blasts went off._

_The wail rose again, too loud in the eerie stillness of the winding alleyway. "Please! Help me, dear God, help!"_

_Glass crunched under Harry's boots. "Where are you!" he cried out, disoriented in the mess that used to be a busy street. Harry ducked under a heavy lintel that had fallen across the way, the air leaving his lungs as the gash on his abdomen split open again and started to bleed. _

_His grip on his wand slipped a bit before he could manage a mild healing charm, blood coating the palm of his hand. Harry wasn't sure, but from the stabbing ache deep inside his belly, he guessed something important had ruptured when the explosion blasted him into the side of a building. _

_Smoke drifted through the alley, hazy and pungent. Whole shops were demolished, spilling their wares onto the streets. Twenty feet away, a hand peaked out from the debris, dusty from the pulverized stone that had once been a storefront. _

"_Hello?" Harry called out._

"_Here! I'm here! Oh god!" came the voice from behind the wreckage. _

_Harry rounded the ruins, his robes snagging on the sharp edges. "I see you – I'm headed your way!"_

_The man lay half-buried under a piece of roofing, heavy stone block pining it and him to the ground. He was young, maybe a few years older than Harry himself, sandy hair matted with blood and glass. He didn't look good. _

_Harry dropped to his knees beside him, reaching out to grasp the man's flailing hand. "Hey, I'm here."_

"_Please," the man gasped, a mist of tiny red droplets splattering the area around his nose and mouth. "Please, I can't move!"_

"_I know," Harry told the dying wizard. "I'm not going anywhere until we can get you out of here."_

_The man's eyes were white around the edges with pain and fear and Harry realized he couldn't see. He'd been close to ground zero where the blasts went off, searing his retinas. "Wh-who?" Blood burbled in the man's throat._

_Harry tightened his grasp on the man's hand. "My name's Harry. What's yours?"_

"_Aaron," the man choked out. Aaron's ribs were concave all through the left side, punched in like a broken drum. The whole of his left side had taken the brunt of impact and by the weakening of his grip, it didn't look like he had long._

"_Aaron," Harry repeated. "What House were you in, Aaron?"_

"_Raven – " Aaron spit up more blood before he could finish the word. His grip spasmed, body jerking erratically as it worked for air that would never come. And then he stilled, blood running from his nostrils._

_Harry bowed his head and folded Aaron's hand over his body. Sitting back on his heels, Harry swallowed back the lump of emotion in his throat, anger warring with exhaustion. The concussion made it hard to follow a single train of thought and he wondered how he was going to get out of here._

_He wasn't usually this slow, but it took him a bit to understand that the blood seeping into the knees of his jeans wasn't all from Aaron's corpse. The wound had split open again, warm blood soaking into the hemline of his jeans._

"_Fuck!" he ground out, placing a hand over the injury as he tried to halt the sluggish seep of blood. _

"_We've got a live one!" _

_Harry flinched at the loud voice, landing sideways across Aaron's corpse. The lime green robes of a mediwizard flashed in the corner of his eye. _

_Rock shifted beside him. "Careful!" Harry shouted. "This thing could come down on me at any moment."_

_Footsteps clambered over the rubble behind him. "My God! Somebody actually survived this," a woman muttered._

_A face topped with mousy brown hair appeared in his line of sight. "Sir? How badly are you hurt?" She raised her wand to shine a light in Harry's eyes, brushing a bit of his fringe away from the cut on his head. Her eyes widened and she gestured frantically at her companion standing behind him. "Merlin's balls! Vivien, get the stretcher! It's Harry Potter!"_

An increase in rain silenced the uproar of voices in his head. The sharp smell of wet tarmac replaced the phantom smells of burnt flesh and ozone. Overhead, the sign of the Leaky Cauldron creaked in the weak breeze that had managed to slink through the dim London alleyway.

'_Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,'_ Harry thought to himself as he made his way through the pub. _'I will fear no evil.'_

Like everything else in his life, it felt like he was muddling his way from one mess to another and he had _no_ idea where to begin. Why was he brought back? Hell, _who_ had the juice to bring him back? As far as Harry knew, he'd just accomplished the impossible. Getting himself reoriented into some passing form of a normal life was going to take a lot of work.

The early morning rain had lowered the profile of Diagon Alley's customers and Harry slid through the remaining shoppers with little fanfare. His plain black robes lent him an edge of anonymity, despite how short they were or the obvious trailing threads where he'd torn out the Gryffindor red lining and House badge.

Harry took a left turn just past Gringotts and disappeared into the gloom of Knockturn Alley.

Knockturn Alley was an old place – older than Diagon Alley if rumour was to be believed. Next to dilapidated 18th century tenements sat graveyard-gardens full of tombstones so weathered the letters had worn away and overgrown greenery. A pair of standing stones formed the entranceway to a pagan church, wee gremlins and bat-winged imps leering at passer-by from their jutting arches over the streets. Stone footbridges crossed overhead, connecting stores and flats that could only be reached by Portkey, Floo or apparation. The gas-flame streetlamps were still lit this early in the morning, an amber glow lighting off the puddles in the street. Off of the main thoroughfare, the lights were lit twenty-four hours a day, most streets being too narrow and overbuilt to see daylight.

The scent of ozone, like the super-charged air after a thunderstorm, was a sure sign of the dark magic that soaked the winding alleyways and its inhabitants. Take a single step off the main street way into the dark shadows and you were on your own. Far larger than Diagon Alley, Knockturn sprawled outwards for miles; many who wandered in had remarked that after passing the first few shops at the mouth of the alley, it was like walking into another world.

And it was a world that Harry had unlimited access to.

Etched onto the soft web of skin between his left thumb and forefinger was the mark of a spider; barely an inch in length, the tattoo granted Harry access to the black markets of the United Kingdom, marking him as one of Knockturn Alley's own. Until needed, the tattoo would lie dormant, appearing as a vague spider-shaped wound, half-lost amongst all of the other thin silvering scars on his hands. Once Harry passed the wards guarding the alleyway, the mark would come to life, flaring the jet and red of the black widow it represented.

It was also a painless way to identify who was supposed to be there and who wasn't. Even Lucius Malfoy and many of the proclaimed "dark" purebloods stayed out of the deeper levels of Knockturn; Harry didn't know what would await those who were unwelcome and he certainly did not want to find out.

Harry had received his mark the summer he turned sixteen from a Dealer named Julius Strome. He'd never asked why Strome used a spider of all things, it had something to do with the vampire's rather grim sense of humour.

Strome had found him wandering Knockturn's warrens, grieving and out of his mind on a rather potent cocktail of drugs. Once Harry sobered up, the vampire had appealed to his desire for revenge with a little mutual tit for tat – Harry worked for him procuring hard to get goods and services and the vampire in turn would teach him some of his more vicious tricks including a rudimentary grasp of swordsmanship. Harry's forceful recruitment into the DoM's Special Forces took care of the rest of his off-the-record education.

If Harry could get in contact with Strome a bit earlier this time around, he might be able to gain enough information to stay ahead of his enemies instead of cleaning up after them.

Ducking under the ivy curtain of a low-lying footbridge, Harry took off down a shortcut through the thinning streets. Rainwater gushed out of the gutters from the deluge hitting the upper-levels, water almost ankle deep in some places. Moss crawled up the walls of the snug little alleyway, bright patches of moist green dotting the stonework.

Harry popped out of the alleyway not far from Tartarus, the pub that guarded the Knockturn Alley entrance to the black markets of London. Down the small set of stairs and into the pub was a wide room with a low ceiling, the effect making it seem like he was in danger of getting squished by low hanging buttresses – somewhat nauseating if you weren't used to it. Seventeen small tables were spread out over the place. Small animal skulls and other odds and ends hung from the ceiling and if looked close enough, you could also see the warding runes crawling over the various knickknacks that powered the wards hiding the entrance to the black markets.

This was a place that catered to several different species. Prejudice wasn't tolerated here. Not because it was a bastion of equality, but because its patrons were likely to tear the offender limb from limb and devour the remains.

He glanced unobtrusively around the room; there was no sign of Strome amongst the teeming patrons. Dodging patrons, Harry threaded his way through the pub towards the half-hidden spiral staircase tucked to the side of the bar.

Boots rattling on the metal steps, Harry descended underground. Nine turns of the staircase left him feeling a bit light-headed when his feet finally hit stone. A wet, earthy smell permeated the cavern and the reek of stagnant water rapidly overtook Harry's senses. The air here was icy cold in his lungs, his breath turning into white clouds of condensation, feet slipping on the damp stone despite the crosshatching grooved into the walkway to provide stability underfoot. He rounded a bend in the stone path and came to a small dock in front of a wide canal full of dark, cold liquid.

A large boat glided to halt in front of him, hardly a ripple disturbing the glass-like surface of the canal. There were no oars and save for a cloaked figure hunched over the prow with a hand on the tiller, it looked as if the boat was propelled by magic alone.

The boat drew parallel with Harry and he lightly stepped on, the boat barely rocking under his weight. Reaching into his pocket, Harry withdrew a galleon and pressed it into the figure's hand. Harry's fingers moved quickly, signing in the Silent One's language the words of greeting. _May the Lords of Magic smile upon you,_ his hands said in the ancient greeting.

The figure replied back, _And also upon you_, its long fingers bending in ways that implied an extra set or two of joints in the hands.

Bits of eerie blue luminescence bobbed along the surface of the water as the boat eased deeper into the waterway. The roar of voices grew and spilled over Harry, filling him with adrenaline. He remembered this, remembered the lust for adventure of his youth.

Harry stepped out of the boat onto one of the docks. He moved with ease among the swarming masses, listening to the frenzy of voices. A multitude of languages washed over him, many of which he could understand and speak instinctively through long hours of practice. There was no dividing line here; purebloods in rags could be found standing next to part-humans or halfbloods in finery, Russians next to Arabs, Mages next to even the weakest wizard, the grotesque intermingled with the rare and the beautiful. Anything and everything could be found here.

He cast out his senses searching for the familiar sensation of Strome's magic.

The sable-haired Dealer was deep in negotiation with a customer. Harry remembered his own exchanges with Strome and pitied the old woman; the man was an absolute nightmare to barter with. But Strome was good at what he did – his network of goods and information stretched across most of Europe. Harry was grateful that Strome despised Voldemort and his ilk. He hated to think what could have happened had Tom Riddle gotten his claws into the Dealer.

The discovery of the Holly wand alerted Harry to his biggest security flaw: It didn't matter if did or did not use the wand with an active Trace, he still showed up on everybody's radar like a burning bush in the middle of a fucking desert.

He should have remembered his second year of Hogwarts where Dobby had used a hover charm and Accidental Magic – not the sharpest knives in the drawer – believed it to be him.

Four silver coins exchanged hands and the hag hobbled away, clutching a small bag in her gnarled hands. Strome looked up, feeling his gaze, but Harry was already moving, ghosting through the crowds. Harry slid in behind the Dealer, waiting patiently for Strome to sense him.

Strome's nostrils flared and the vampire spun around, a sneer curling his upper lip into an expression resembling a snarl.

Harry met the vampire's glare without fear. "Greetings Julius Strome. I hear you can be of assistance to me."

* * *

North rapped on Shorner's office door with his knuckles. "Sir?" he asked, unusually polite for some reason.

Shorner set aside the file he'd been struggling to get through. Some of the DoM's early agents had less than a good grasp of writing and grammar, illegible notes and initials scribbled in the margins. "Come in," Shorner replied, gesturing to the chair in front of the desk.

"You told me to look at the surrounding networks and see if anybody saw something unusual," said North, juggling a thick folder stuffed with both parchment and Muggle print-outs. "I figured, what catches more stray spells and surges other than Accidental Magic?"

Shorner nodded. "What do you have for me?"

North opened the folder, careful to keep the papers inside from falling out and handed him the top sheet of parchment. "This showed up a few hours after the Veil went on the blitz. The girl who caught it didn't know what she was doing which worked well in my favour. I managed to Obliviate her before she could send out an underage magic notice or tell her supervisor."

"Whose is this?" Shorner asked as he glanced over the more technical aspects, a myriad of spell arrays and runes crawling across the read-out.

David North's cool blue gaze didn't even flicker as he gave the whole folder to Shorner. "Judging from the kind of magic your visitor-from-beyond used, I'd say he was a budding young sorcerer of the dark arts."

Shorner flipped the non-descript manila folder open, a few scraps of parchments drifting to the floor before he could catch them. But the name on the first page of the medical exam made him suck in a startled breath despite himself.

_Harry Potter, Number Four of Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey._

* * *

He watched Archimedes Darrin Shorner dash out of his office with his assistant in tow, their flight stirring up a flurry of murmurs from the bullpen of desks outside the office corridor.

Shorner hadn't locked his office. Easing the door open, the figure set his package on Shorner's desk in the middle of his paperwork and carefully arranged the letter on top. It wasn't the subtlest way of handling these matters – and he _did not_ in any way agree with this – but he lacked the luxury of choice. Titania's word was law.

The figure closed the office door behind him and walked out, Faerie magic hiding him from sight.


	4. Storm Wall

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Three

Storm Wall

Harry sat cross-legged on the polished wooden floors of the smallest bedroom of Number 4, Privet Drive.

Dawn had made her entrance in a wash of red – a blazing splash of colour that had slowly faded to the pale dove grey of the summer storms. A light wind blew through the open window, tangling the curtains and tugging on Harry's clothes. He breathed deep and smiled. Mornings to him had always been special.

On his trip through Diagon Alley yesterday, Harry stopped by Gringotts in hopes of finding some way to make money. He'd received a rather interesting series of documents concerning his godfather's finances instead.

For one, under Ministry Law, suspects could only be held for a maximum of six months without trial. Once that time has expired, suspects must either be released or summoned to trial if there was sufficient evidence against them.

Not only was Sirius convicted without trial, but the Ministry had also refused his request for Veritaserum. Understandable, for the truth potion could be overcome; but it was a rare thing. Maybe one out of one hundred people could resist the potent serum. But they hadn't even tested Sirius to see if he was part of that atypical one percent.

And second, the Ministry had sent paperwork to freeze Sirius' assets and seize his liquefied possessions. As it were, Gringotts could only freeze the assets of convicted criminals, and Sirius had never been officially found guilty of any crimes. The Ministry had been trying for years to confiscate the resources of imprisoned Death Eaters, which included Sirius whom they were holding illegally.

Harry chuckled and began sorting through the mountain of paperwork. It'd been awhile since he'd done things the legal way, but he just couldn't resist retaliation when someone was stupid enough to bring their own rope to a hanging.

The Ministry would not know what hit them.

* * *

Shorner stared at the crisp letter unfolded on the desk next to the heavy tome with the cracked leather bindings. The letter was simple, a single sentence writ on a crisp sheet of fawn-coloured parchment.

_Perhaps this will help._

A part of him wanted to call in the people from Curse and Poison Control and hand this over to them fast as humanly possible. But the chances of a package making it this far into the Ministry without being vetted by several experienced potions makers and curse breakers was slim to none. And other than its mysterious appearance on his desk, there wasn't a hint of magic on the letter or book. The letter had been writ by hand, not magic and the book was a dime a dozen copy from a printing press – probably a cheap Knockturn Alley knockoff by the way the ink had bled and run over the title page.

_Sharr,_ read the title page in a hard black typeface, _Seventh House of the Lords of Magic._ The detailed crest under the name displayed a rearing thestral on a full moon backdrop with an overlay of a crossed dagger and wand under a violet rose in bloom. The banner underneath read: _IN VITA EST NEX_.

This was the sort of thing the wizarding world occasionally checked over their shoulders for. The paranoia pertaining to the Sharr family was justified in its extremity. Over the years, the line had produced many powerful witches and wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, mages – several of whom were very, _very_ dark. These were people who had gone so far off the deep end they might as well be sailing through the black, uncharted waters of an abyssal trench.

'_Not dark as in evil_', Shorner reminded himself, '_but rather, dark as in questionable sanity dark.' _

The madness so prevalent in the Sharr line was usually attributed to intermarriage with a variety of dark creatures; Old World Families were well noted for marrying outside of acceptable circles. Say what you would about pureblood dogma: Sometimes breeding would out and appeasing all of the hungers running through their blood had driven more than one Sharr Lord or Lady off the edge. Families like the Malfoys, Notts – having only been around since the early Middle Ages – disdained the practice of interspecies marriage. The only madness that could be attributed to them was the product of inbreeding and incest.

It was a shame that many of the Old World families had died out, mostly due to infighting.

Shorner turned the page. A large, twelve-pointed star was spread across the middle of two pages, its edges not quite meeting up due to the cheaply made bindings.

The twelve-pointed star was the symbol of the Twelve Houses of the Lords of Magic, which was the actual title of the Old World Families. The Families were divided in half – six Light and six Dark as represented by the star. Six points of the overlapping triangles gleamed in the gold and crystalline white of the Light Families and six in the silver and matte black of the Dark Families. And at each of the points rested a name printed in the same heavy typeface as the rest of the book, a quick artist's sketch of the house crest in black and white.

He thumbed through to the back of the tome where the more recent history would be written. Some of the names he raised an eyebrow at. _Venus Slytherin 1846 – 1891_ who, granted, wasn't the Heir of Slytherin, but she was fascinating nonetheless. She'd married Carracus Sharr, and they'd had a son named Timonzel Sharr, who had been the one to go through the Veil the first time in 1898. He'd married a vampire, by the name of Lady Mir A'dayr who produced an heir named Devon Sharr. Interestingly enough, the son of Devon Sharr was _Artimis Sharr 1914 – 1962_, the man more commonly known as Lord Grindelwald.

Lord Grindelwald had been known for two things: his madness and his wife – a dark veela by the name of Bree Verall who, before her death, had been one of the most beautiful women of the magical world.

The term "dark veela" was a complete misnomer. There was no such thing. Oh sure, they were stunningly beautiful and had a psychic "allure" somewhat similar to veela.

But what the wizarding world termed "dark veela" was actually a breed of Unseelie. Morrigans, who ate the flesh of the living and the dead; they were the Children of Cailleach Bheur, born of Winter's bosom. Mother Shipton, the famous prophetess of the sixteenth century, had reportedly cackled with laughter when asked about Morrigans and replied, "Woe to you who tangle with Maledicte's Get. The most comely faces hide the most hideous monsters."

Maledicte's Get – cursed born – was a good term for them. Morrigans were dangerous business best left to history and legend. The Fae, both Seelie and Unseelie, involved themselves less and less in the mortal world as science took hold, but there were still those amongst the wizarding world who were wary of fey affairs.

Shorner began tracing names through the muddle of information again.

Artimis Sharr and Bree Verall had two children, both of whom were girls. The oldest, Alissé Petunia Sharr was nine years older than Lily Aideen Sharr, and she seemed to have suffered a debilitating disease in early childhood. Alissé's name disappeared after one last mention of her sister being born in 1960.

He could think of only two reasons why a child of the Sharr would vanish so readily: death or disfigurement from disease.

During the late 1950s, a type of magical cholera had swept across Western Europe. The disease had fed on the magic of the person, and most of the early cases had been lost. Those that had lived were left as little more than Muggles – even squibs had more magic in their bodies than those few survivors. There was a very good chance that Alissé was still alive – alive and bitter for what she'd lost, if someone hadn't been merciful enough to obliviate the memory of magic from her.

In the margin of the book, written next to the name of Lily Aideen Sharr in the same handwriting as the letter, was the name _Hadrian James Sharr_.

Nothing else, just a random name inked into the book.

Irritation and no small amount of alarm rippled through Shorner.

Who had left the letter? And what did they want him to find?

Shorner hated having his strings pulled by other people and this, on top of the Veil rising from its dormancy, left a chill along the skin of his spine.

The timing was too convenient, but the most disconcerting part in all of this?

Only David North and himself knew anything about the Veil going active.

And Shorner didn't believe in coincidence.

A sudden flash of insight hit Shorner, and he found himself running through the busy bullpen towards the dusty rooms where the birth records were kept. Lily Aideen Sharr had been born in 1960; not many magical female children had been born that year – of course! That was why he had remembered it! The beauty of bureaucracy was that they recorded everything.

Dust swirled in the air as he pushed open the tall doors to the Archives. Magic couldn't be used in here without setting off a myriad of alarms so Shorner stifled a sneeze and looped the collar of his robes up over his nose.

The birth records were kept in cedar filing cabinets lining the back rows. Shorner strode through the tall rows of bookcases to the back of the room, the dusty picture windows throwing grey motes of light over the Archive floor.

None of the cabinets within reach were marked for the year he was looking for. Shorner grabbed the sliding ladder and dragged it over to the drawers marked for the 1950s. Twenty feet up, he finally spotted the correct cabinet.

Perching precariously on the teetering ladder, Shorner yanked open the filing cabinet drawer with _1960_ written across the placard, almost pulling it off the magically oiled glides in his haste. In the back was a thin file labelled _Sharr, Lily Aideen_. Shorner opened the folder to the single page that was in there. _Sharr, Lily Aideen_, it read at the top. _Female:_ _Born –_ _30 January 1960. Died – 31 October 1981; Parents: Artimis Sharr & Bree Verall; Weight (at birth): 5 pounds, 6 ounces; Surviving family: Hadrian James Sharr, son._

1981.

The thirty-first of October in nineteen eighty-one – what was so significant about that date? And there was nothing else written in the folder; no blood work, no accidental magic – nothing.

A piece of the puzzle clunked into place.

Dread, it was dread that made his fingers shake. It was dread that made his heart race. And it was dread that made him climb down the ladder towards the filing cabinets marked _Muggleborns_ that sat under the windows_._ Shorner opened the drawer to the births of 1960; there were only three files marked for the birth date of 30 January 1960, and two of those were boys. He pulled out the folder marked _Evans, Lily Anne. _

Flipping it open, Shorner placed the two folders side by side on top of the cabinets. _Evans, Lily Anne. Female:_ _Born –_ _30 January 1960. Died – 31 October 1981. Parents: Unknown, adopted on 23 December 1963 by Morgan & Elizabeth Evans; Married to James Nicholas Potter 21 April 1979; Surviving Family: Petunia Evans, sister; Harry James Potter, son._

They were almost exactly the same. Shorner began to laugh. _'Who am I kidding? They're the same person!'_

He calmly tucked the folders under his arm and closed the filing cabinet, a quick series of runes written across the backs of the folders negating the alarms and tracking charms that would go off the moment he removed them from the Archives. He slipped back through the maze of the DoM to his office, the world around him muffled and distant like he was walking underwater.

His office door closed behind him. Dropping the files onto his desk next to the letter, Shorner collapsed in his chair before his feet could go out from under him.

_Hadrian James Sharr / Harry James Potter_

Shorner was in over his head and sinking fast.

* * *

The rubbish bin next to Harry's makeshift desk was quite full by now, overflowing with balled up pieces of paper. He had spent most of his morning and a good part of the rainy afternoon drafting and re-drafting a Petition for Redress from the Ministry. There was no doubt in Harry's mind that Sirius' appeal was going to fuck up in as many ways as possible. It was one of Murphy's Laws: what can go wrong, will go wrong and will do so in the worst way imaginable.

It was getting dark now. The Dursleys had left about an hour ago to drop Dudley off at a friend's house and to go out for dinner and a movie. They had obviously not invited Harry and had they not been quite so frightened of him, they probably would have locked him in the cupboard under the stairs.

Petunia hadn't mentioned the incident in the kitchen since it happened. Nothing on the mess or him pointing a gun at her or him using magic on there was something new in the way she looked at him now, a wariness that hadn't been there before. She was someone who was used to dominating the household, and he had brushed aside Petunia's authority over her own little fiefdom the same way one would brush aside an errant crumb on the tabletop.

He half expected the police to come knocking on the door any day now.

Harry reached for a blank sheet of paper, accidentally knocking a pile of parchments over with his elbow.

"Shit," he said as he scrambled pick up the papers. A loud clunk echoed from somewhere below him and it had nothing to do with the feathery hiss of drifting paper. Harry froze and spread his senses outwards; the Dursleys were not due to be back for another three hours. There was somebody magical in the house, somebody magical who was definitely _not _supposed to be there.

Harry reached over to the mattress where his Beretta lay from when he had been cleaning it, gun oil smeared onto the sheets. He picked up the weapon and loaded a magazine in it as he padded barefoot towards the door.

Now that he was in the hallway, Harry couldn't believe that he hadn't sensed this person sooner; the taste and feel of magic was so strong that even an ordinary Muggle would know something was off.

Harry prowled downstairs, sticking to the shadows as he went. The person was in the kitchen, whoever it was. He slipped through the doorway of the living room into the darkened kitchen. The metallic click of the safety being flicked off echoed through the black space. "I want to know who you are and what you are doing here."

It was her perfume he smelled first: thick, sweet and inescapably wild, like orchids and vetiver and velvet night skies.

"Oh, it is not myself that you should be concerned with at the moment."

The cultured voice that answered was rich, suggestive and most definitely feminine. Not taking his eyes or his gun off the figure's now faint outline, Harry reached out and flipped the light switch.

Poets and tyrants alike loved describing a woman's beauty. From the likes of Byron to the Song of Solomon, odes were written to the curve of her breasts, the arch of her neck, and the sway of her hips. Wars and blood feuds the same were often started over a woman whose visage made man lose all sense and reason.

Harry was of the opinion that it was women, not men, who ran the world, and everyone else were just lapdogs to their whims.

In the stark, utilitarian brightness of the Dursley's kitchen sat a woman who could give even Fleur Delacour and her veela kin some serious competition.

She lounged idly on the kitchen table; the line of one slim, long leg crossed over the other drew his eye to where her pale skin met the charcoal grey of her skirt mid-thigh. The fluorescent glow of the kitchen light should have washed out her features. It didn't.

Fine jewel-tones of deep blue, green and amethyst glimmered where the light glinted off her snowy hair. White hair – not white-blonde like the Malfoys or the silvering of old age – but white like fresh snow, white like perfection, a white that made him think of things like avenging angels. She smiled, and lips the colour of mulberries curled into a smirk that smacked of satisfaction. Even a cat would be hard-pressed to match the sheer hedonistic pleasure of a slow smile like that. Oblique green eyes flickered blue-white and back again as she looked him over in return.

Jaw-droppingly beautiful would not come close to describing her.

She wore her snow-white hair tied back in a shining knot at the nape of her neck, long hair spilling over her shoulder. A fitted button-down in a shade of blackberry and heeled oxford boots completed the ensemble. Opals gleamed at her throat and ears in shifting hues of crimson, sapphire and violet. She looked like the CEO of a powerful international company. Well, either that or the matron of a criminal empire. He wasn't that good judge of character.

But he did wish he was meeting her something other than ripped jeans and a t-shirt that had seen better days.

"And just what is it that I _should_ be concerned with cause it's not every day I have someone break into my house looking like a seriously expensive hooker."

She raised a white eyebrow and gave him a rather condescending smile. "You were much more polite when I last met you."

Harry laughed. "I may have been knocked on the head a few times in the past, but believe me sweetheart, I'd know if I'd met you."

She didn't bother to hide her amusement. "Stubborn. I _usually_ appreciate it in a man," she replied, wrapping her mouth around the words in a very distracting way.

There was no trace of a smile on Harry's face now. "I do so _hate_ to disappoint," he said, his light tone at odds with steadiness of the weapon he held in her direction. "I take it quite personally you know."

"So I've heard," she drawled. She sounded like she was playing with him. She probably was. Her eyes flickered over the gun. Harry didn't like how easily she dismissed the weapon. It wasn't that she didn't know what it was intended for like a lot of the wizarding world, it that she wasn't bothered at all. Few had power enough to laugh off bullets. Chances were the Berretta wouldn't work too well against her anyway.

Harry sighed and flicked the safety back on before tucking the gun into the back of his jeans. "Alright, I give up. What do you want?"

"You should be more concerned, Harry. This _is_ your life we're talking about."

Crossing his arms, he leaned against the counter and chuckled. "Oh Gawd, _please_ tell me this isn't another one of those 'join me or die' moments. 'Cause I gotta tell you – I've had more than enough to last a lifetime."

"You died." She said it like she was describing the weather. Bland. Factual.

Wind rushed in his ears.

"White light. Team dead. The murmur of dark water in your ears – you were supposed to be dead, too."

His blood hummed in his veins, violent and hungry. He gripped the counter to keep from hurling himself at her.

"But you woke up here instead. And now your world has gone topsy-turvy, and you are floundering in the wake of madness," she murmured, mulberry lips wrapping sensuously around the words that kept chipping cracks in his psyche.

"Who are you?" The words emerged low and harsh, like the sound of cars travelling over gravel.

Her lips quirked into a smile. "You owe me."

He snarled, and his vision flared red. "I _owe_ you? I don't even know who you are!"

She cut him off. "You have a debt to me. I'm calling it in."

"The fuck you are!"

"Hold. Your. Tongue."

He did.

Silence turned the space between then into a mile long expanse of no-man's land. Behind that fair, exquisite face was ice and steel, something so utterly inhuman that it had forgotten what mortality was like. She was old, _ancient_ more like; he wondered how he could have missed this. And how long ago it was that she became something else, something that could imitate humanity, but wasn't. Wasn't even close. The notion that this strange woman was not fabricating what she said occurred to Harry. He began to wonder if he had the whole story; there was that blank spot in his memory between detonating the bombs and waking up in his younger body. It bothered him, more so than he wanted to admit to.

_She_ bothered him. Very few people managed to do that.

Something about this didn't ring quite right, and a twinge of unease started in his gut. This woman with her beautiful face was very, _very_ dangerous. He was in _way_ over his head. He knew it. She knew it. And she was more than a little pleased with the status quo.

She smiled, slow and cruel and extraordinarily beautiful. "I'm not the kind of woman who gambles lightly. I'm not placing bets if I don't know I'm going to win. But you," she tilted her head and Harry watched as her pupils changed into cold, inhuman slits. "I'm willing to place a wager on you."

Harry struggled to unstick his jaw. "Such confidence," he croaked. "You do know my track record isn't so hot."

Her lips peeled back into what should have been a smile. It wasn't. Any signs of humanity had long been discarded. "I like to think you have a bigger incentive to succeed this time."

She brought to mind a phrase Moody had taught him: Never ever forget that there will always be someone bigger, better and stronger than you.

The temperature in the kitchen was cold enough to freeze his breath. "Incentive? What's this thing called incentive you speak of?" He grinned. "You don't think I had enough before?"

"Do you know what would have happened after your death?"

That stopped all of Harry's cognitive functions. "What?"

"The world didn't end with you, Harry. That's a very selfish thing to think." On a lesser being it would have been a petty taunt. On her it was just a rather malicious way of telling the truth. "Your friends lose hope, and your little resistance group is picked off one by one. Your faction falls.

"Voldemort has won, and he is greedy. Europe is next. The Americas are next. And they are fighting against too many enemies with too few allies. They fall as well. Russia, Italy, Africa. Everyone falls. The world is conquered. Your enemies celebrate their victory.

"A year goes by, and supplies are running low. They begin to fight amongst themselves for what little is left in the world. The ravaged planet is destroyed beyond repair, and they hoard what little they can find, killing each other so they can preserve their meagre supplies. Twenty years later, there is nobody left; wizards, inadaptable and selfish, have killed off the very thing they need to survive – Muggles. And with the release of so much magic, the world tears itself asunder and is cast into darkness."

There was a small stillness at the end of her words. Like the earth itself stopped to listen to her presage its last laboured breaths.

A bruised knot of tension pulled tight inside his chest. Harry laughed. He laughed because that was the only thing he could think of doing. There was a hysterical edge in his laughter that made him wonder if he hadn't already plunged over the lines dividing sanity from madness. His breath petered out, and he wiped at the tears trailing from his eyes, marvelling at how empty he felt.

Harry stared at his bare feet peeking out of the ragged hemline of his jeans. "Who are you?" he said finally, looking back at her green, feline eyes.

She watched him, a primordial being from far before the concept of time, someone old and powerful even when his own race still used tools of stone and claw. "I am Mab," she murmured. "Queen of Air and Darkness. Monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe. Ruler of the Unseelie."


	5. The Glass Hammer

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Four

The Glass Hammer

The floor fell from beneath his feet.

He licked his lips, a nervous gesture left-over from childhood. His thoughts whirled past, rushing from him, leaving him filled with nothing but white noise and confusion. And when he spoke, the raw edges of his words buzzed in his head with leftover static.

"What could someone like you, possibly want with someone like me?" he said softly into the vast space that had opened in the cold air between them.

She tilted her head and regarded him with a quite intensity. "You do not remember, then?" she inquired, a note of humanity slipping back into her voice.

"I have no memory of you. And believe me, you leave quite an impression on people."

"Pity," she said, her lips quirking into an enigmatic smile. "I did so enjoy your cheek."

"I apologize for my earlier display of temper. It was uncalled for."

She waved away his comment. "You said _much_ worse the first time we met."

Harry grimaced, wondering when he'd get to experience his spine flying through the top of his head.

Mab smiled, her slit-pupiled eyes glittering with amusement. "Don't put on airs on my account, Harry. There's no respect in that."

"Why?" he replied in bewilderment as the world began to swirl around him in tandem with the teeth-grinding noise in his head. "Why me?"

"Why not you?" Her smile deepened. She held out a hand and Harry found himself moving forward, kneeling without prompt, the bones of Mab's face shining with a sudden, terrible beauty.

And the world slowed, as still and cool as a grey winter morning, everything narrowed down to the thundering of his heart and _her_.

He was not Harry Potter; he had no name.

He wasn't a soldier; he had no-one to kill.

He had no need to eat, no need to sleep; his body was not his. He was nothing and the only thing that was, was her – she who was at the beginning and who had seen the end.

Mab stood before him; a penumbra of dark crystalline power surrounding her. Ice formed on the floor, the windows, the counters; thick, white sheets of it that cracked and groaned as they breathed. The Muggle appliances whirred to a stop. The indigo hum of Winter's power writhed and seethed through the air, quivering under his skin, something cold and dark and liquid inside of him answering her call. He wanted to rub himself against her legs like a cat, enfold himself in the frozen oblivion of her will.

Her word was absolute and her power undisputed. She had toppled kingdoms with a breath and raised empires with a gesture. A veritable Goddess stood before him and only his total acquiescence would please her. But he didn't mind. How could he? He was hers. He wanted to submit. It was all he had left to give.

She raised a hand to his face and he found himself leaning into the caress. The live-wire spark of his magic ignited at the touch and his vision went blue, then purple, then black.

* * *

_The rain is cold and razor-sharp on Harry's skin._

_Ruins of a once great castle are littered underfoot; jagged remains of walls, battlements and towers thrust upward into the sky. There is a gaping crater where the Great Hall has collapsed into the dungeons below. Looking past the broken edge of the floor, Harry peers down into the dark, icy water that lay so far below him. Sharp rocks rise out of the water like a ring of broken teeth from an oily black mouth. He shudders and steps back. _

_A familiar voice floats towards Harry over the wailing of the wind. He knows this voice. He knows this voice very well. _

"_Professor Dumbledore?" Harry calls out in disbelief. _

_The ageing wizard wanders distractedly around the remains of the Great Hall, humming a nursery ditty to himself. Dressed as he is in cheerfully coloured robes, Harry almost misses the gaping wound in Dumbledore's upper body. _

_The headmaster turns to look at him and smiles. "Harry my dear boy! How are you doing on this fine day?"_

_Harry glances around him incredulously, "Fine day? You call this a fucking fine day?" _

_Dumbledore has the grace to look abashed, "Ah, well, perhaps I was being a bit too optimistic." _

"_You're loonier in death than you were in life."_

"_Sanity is fleeting, Harry," Dumbledore says looking over the rims of his glasses at Harry. "You of all people should know this."_

_He wants to scream at Dumbledore, to rage at the old man for abandoning him to suffer the war. He wants to cry out to the weeping sky to take him as well. Harry buries his face in his hands and laughs over the absurdity of it all. In the end, this is all on him and if life has taught him nothing else, he knows right where to place the blame._

"_Why am I here?" He says finally, looking up at Dumbledore. "Why did I bring myself here? So that I could feel even more miserable than I already do? It's not enough to just feel guilty; no I have to actually hurt. _What_ is so fucked up with my subconscious that I keep dreaming about this goddamn castle?" Harry snarls, voice derisive and angry. _

_Understanding settles on the old mage's face. "You did bring yourself here, yes; but not to dwell on the departed. In order to understand the meaning of this place, you must first ask yourself how you got here."_

"_And just __**how**__ did I get here?" Harry replies with a sour, mocking note. _

"_I'm dead, Harry, not a crystal ball," Dumbledore says dryly. "That is something you must ask yourself. I am only here for guidance."_

"_Great," Harry sing-songs, drawing out the long ā sound of the word. "__Some people get crickets. I get a crazed old spook for a conscience. If you can't tell me _why_ I'm here and I can't answer _how_ I got here, then maybe you can tell me _what_ I am doing here."_

_Dumbledore looks pleased. "Very good, my boy. What you are here for is a bit of knowledge. If it makes you feel better, you may think of me as a combination of an old mentor and the lesser used recesses of your subconscious." _

"_That's just wonderful. Still doesn't tell me anything useful. I'm not exactly in the mood to play twenty questions with the empty parts of my brain, old man. Unlike you, I don't have eternity." he drawls, shoving his hands into his pockets. Harry scuffs the bottom of his boots against the ground, restless, nervous energy running through him._

_Dumbledore gestures to wreckage around him. "Look around you. What do you see?"_

_Harry blinks then shrugs his shoulders. "Hogwarts. Or well, what used to be Hogwarts." He has never gotten used to that even though he remembers the castle destroyed more years than he remembers it whole._

"_Yes and no. You are looking at things in a linear fashion and rarely does the mind work that way. You must ask yourself what the significance of this place is, what your role here is and why it is important. Know this is not necessarily a world of absolute reality here. This place is a world of perceptions. Now think, Harry," Dumbledore says, focusing an intent gaze upon his own. "Think really hard. What do you see?"_

_He looks away, too raw, too open to meet Dumbledore's stare any longer. He swallows, mouth uncomfortably dry. "This is my failure. This is how the world will be if I don't change it. If I can't change it."_

_Dumbledore sighs and his visage grows sad and worn, losing the bright spark in his eyes. "Yes and no. Events are not as fixed here as they are outside."_

_Harry makes a face. "What?" he says, feeling redundant and childish in his confusion._

_The headmaster raises a bushy grey eyebrow. "Harry, this is your mind." A book falls from his hands, landing upright on the ends of its pages._

_Claws tear at Harry's spine and he hits the ground convulsing, vision blurring with the white-hot fire screaming through his nerves. His head slams back into the cracked stones, body arching upward so hard he thinks his spine will snap. Harry's throat closes up and his sight begins to blacken at the lack of oxygen. _

_Someone giggles behind him and Harry catches a flash of eerily familiar green eyes as a young, dark-haired child whispers in his ear._

"_Something wicked this way comes."_

Harry surged upward from his place on the floor, twisting the figure's arms behind their back as he pinned them to the floor, the Berretta nine jabbed into the soft underside of their chin.

The static faded from his ears and he belatedly recognized Petunia's shrill whimper. A thunderous vibration echoed through the house and Vernon Dursley appeared in kitchen doorway, moustache twitching on his purple face.

"_PETUNIA! My Pet, are you all right?_ What's the boy done now…" Vernon had caught sight of the same thing Aunt Petunia was now whimpering at and nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to back away.

It took Harry a moment to realize what was wrong.

He rolled off of his aunt and stood, keeping the Beretta trained on the bulky figure in the doorway. Ice flaked off his skin as he moved, small droplets melting from his hair and eyelashes. The rest of the kitchen was untouched, no ice, no magic, no sign the Winter Queen had stood in this incongruously Muggle kitchen and brought him willingly to his knees before her. His magic murmured sleepily in his veins before subsiding.

Petunia's shaky, half-whispered question nearly went unnoticed. "W-what do you want?"

Harry pulled a chair out from the table and collapsed limply into it; his nerves were still twitching with the phantom sensations of seizure. It made him feel uncomfortably weak. "What happened?"

Petunia flinched. "I… I found you on the floor."

"And?"

She shook her head, blonde wisps flying free, her eyes wide with fright and shock. "Your lips were blue and you were all covered in frost. I thought you were dead."

Anger blossomed low in his gut and he rose from the chair. "Obviously not," he bit out, not bothering to modulate his tone. His uncle's eyes were fastened to the weapon in Harry's hands, a giant, cumbersome statue occupying the doorway. Harry growled at him and the man scrambled backwards.

"Wait!" his aunt called from her spot on the floor. "There was a letter…"

Flipping the safety on, Harry tucked the Berretta nine into the back of his jeans. He grabbed the crisp white envelope from her hands and slit it open with the edge of his ragged thumbnail. The scent of orchids, wild and heavy, lifted into the air, as he pulled out a pale blue sheet of paper so fine it was almost translucent.

_Harry,_ it read, the handwriting a sharp, slanting script that reminded him of snow-covered mountains rising into the sky.

_The mark on your arm is a symbol of my protection and will give you safe passage through my wards. I have determined Privet Drive to be a compromised location and for the matters we must discuss I need the assurance of no listening ears. My envoy will be waiting for you tomorrow morning at 9:30, Gerrard St. in Soho. You will know who it is. _

It was unsigned, but Harry already knew whom it was from. The mark she talked of was so light that it was barely noticeable against his skin. He held his left wrist up to the sunlight from the window and watched as a series of tiny runes glimmered in blue-white bands of opalescence before fading away. It didn't look like a 'mark'; it looked like brand, one half of a pair of chains to ensure his loyalty.

He carefully folded the letter away and tucked it into his waistband next to the Beretta, anger burning low in his belly.

"Thank you," he said as he breezed past their stunned faces.


	6. The Twilight Zone

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**(A/N)** Originally Chinatown was in the East End of London but moved West due to the prosperity of the Chinese and the popularity of Chinese food and culture. The previous Chinatown in the Limehouse region of London was known more for its opium dens, which were actually _legal_ and its slum housing, which is normally associated with immigration, not the Chinese restaurants and supermarkets in the current Chinatown.

A number of elderly Chinese still live in this area. Japanese, Singaporeans, and Koreans, as well as Chinese live in today's Chinatown. There are many illegal workers in London's Chinatown who get less than minimum wage.

Also it is known that the Triads are operating there, highlighted by a man being shot dead in broad daylight in June 2003 in the "brb bar" on Gerrard Street. Fun shit. And here you thought stuff like that never happened in real life.

The Twilight Zone

Chapter Five

This was not a particular part of London Harry was intimately familiar with.

Gerrard St., as it turned out, was right in the middle of Chinatown.

**Gerrard St., London; Soho – Chinatown district: **

Mab's envoy stood in front of a pair of oriental marble lions. She had the small bone structure and delicate pale-gold features typical of East Asian women. Her long dark hair was pulled back from her face by a pair of jade combs and she wore a short white silk dress with a high mandarin collar that showed a generous amount of leg and a pair of slippers that matched.

It was also very evident that she was not of this world, something about her manner screamed inhuman.

Amongst the Chinese food restaurants, the obvious tourists and the windows full of brightly coloured packages of foreign foods, Harry also stood out like a sore thumb. He was starting to attract many strange looks. Or, now that he thought about it, it could be his wakizashi, the shorter blade of his daisho, slung low on his hips over his long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans.

A mild note of irritation lit within him at his own carelessness. Harry was far too used to walking around heavily armed without anyone batting an eyelash – he should have cast a notice-me-not-charm before he even left the house.

He glanced at one of the tourists; she flinched, cowering away out of his sight while her husband pulled her protectively to his side, eyeballing Harry warily. Ignoring the peculiar looks, Harry threaded his way through the obnoxious tour groups to the Winter Queen's messenger. He nodded to her.

She gazed back impassively at him, dark eyes shuttered and opaque, a black, arching eyebrow raised in question.

He reached up and pretended to scratch at the side of his neck. It didn't take much more than a single spark of power for the unseen lines of Mab's marks on his wrists to flare with opaline iridescence.

The messenger's eyes widened as she caught sight of the marks where his sleeve had fallen back. She bowed to him from the waist.

"Please follow me," she said, her voice flavoured with something exotic. Turning she led him into the darkened interior of a nearby restaurant and to a narrow hallway. She gestured for him to go on alone.

Harry stepped forward.

The smell of garlic and grease vanished. In its place came the scent of ice and rime. Darkness thickened the air. Cool, glassy black stone covered in frost appeared in the place of the rice paper walls from the restaurant hallway. Harry could not see the ceiling; the walls around just extended up, up into blackness. The floor beneath his feet radiated a bitter cold that Harry could keenly feel through the thick soles of his boots, the sounds of his footsteps muffled in the soft crunch of snow.

There was a door at the end of the corridor; heavy and old, the frost-blackened metal had warped and rusted from the patchwork of thick ice covering its surface. A wire-covered light buzzed faintly beside the door, a deep chill blue gleaming off of the glassy black stone of the hallway from its luminescence.

Harry tugged his sleeve down over his hand and rapped on the door three times. It rang loud and brash, sound radiating out from it and Harry felt uncomfortably like every eye in the place had just turned on him.

There was a strange smell about the corridor that he hadn't noticed amongst the first onslaught of the cold. It was a syrupy odour, a sweet stench that made Harry want to gag in realization.

Death, the hallway smelled of death.

With a sinking feeling, Harry turned around. The rice paper walls had vanished, replaced with more long, dark corridor; his prints in the thick snow of the hallway looking oddly forlorn and vulnerable where they started in the middle of nowhere. Something moved in the blackness beyond him, a barely audible rustle of fur and frost and it did not have good intentions in mind.

Harry had never enjoyed feeling like prey. The comforting weight of his wand made its way into his hands. 12 ½ inches of yew and thestral hair lacquered in dementor's blood vibrated eagerly in his grip.

Two sets of glowing slit-pupiled eyes blinked at him from the black of the corridor, moving noticeably closer in time. Then one sank low to the ground and the other disappeared.

"What the hell?" Harry muttered under his breath. Mab's emissary had dumped his ass a freaky winter wonderland dimension - there was no telling what he would encounter here. Just his fucking luck.

A huff of laughter pealed out of the darkness, followed by something the size of a lynx. It flowed out of the blackness, dark grey and feline and striped in jet like a tiger. Tufts of snowy white dotted the tips of its ears and along its eyes in a negative inverse of a cheetah's markings. Great yellow-green eyes gleamed back at Harry with far too much intelligence for a mere beast. "The question be, what are _you_?" it mewled.

"I'm a man on a mission," Harry replied lightly, not daring to show his discomfort. _'Here kitty, kitty, kitty.'_

"A mission from who?" it purred.

_'A mission from God,'_ he thought, not really in the mood to mince words with Fluffy the friendly neighbourhood nightmare. "From Mab," Harry said tersely. "I'm here on a task given to me by Mab."

The thing smiled with all the warmth of a shark and with twice as many teeth. Harry's skin crawled at the sight. "Here?" it said. "But you don't smell like food. You smell like anger and fire and desire. Like darkness and ice and hunger. What are _you_?"

Harry gritted his teeth and returned the smile. "Last time I checked, I was a guy."

The other pair of eyes in the darkness blinked and leapt at Harry. Snarling, it landed on the wall above him, claws digging deep furrows into the thick ice jutting out over the door, eyes glaring balefully into Harry's. Saliva dripped from its jaws as it growled, a low buzz-saw rumble that was more felt than heard - like an over-tuned bass note from a synthesizer.

Harry crouched and bared his teeth at it without consciously realizing what he was doing. He recognized it now - a maulk, a creature of Deep Winter. It was a vicious beast and an even smarter hunter. Maulks generally weren't picky about what they ate, humans included.

The first maulk sat on its haunches, jowls lolling open into a fanged grin. "You smell like one of us, Darkling. But passage will be denied to you until you answer my question. Thrice have I asked, what are _you_?"

Harry opened his mouth to tell it the he was a seriously pissed-off wizard, but something invisible with claws and teeth wrapped around his throat and strangled the words before they left his lips.

Instinct had him hitting the ground, rolling to avoid the other creature's claws. Instinct had him unleash a silent gout of red-orange flame from the tip of his wand. And instinct saved his ass again when it caught the maulk in mid-leap, its body crashing to the ground in a crispy heap. It wailed pitifully, fur smoking as it thrashed about in the thick snow.

Harry drew his wakizashi and in one quick, spinning step, relieved the creature of its head. He turned into the momentum of the kata and stilled, blade pointed at the first creature, his body poised for action.

"I don't know," he told the creature roughly, blue-green internal fluids flowing sluggishly down the blood grove of his sword angled overhead. "I don't know what I am."

It was true. He hadn't for a long time. The change was subtle, slow enough that he hadn't realized what was happening until he'd torn the Death Eater's throat out with his bare teeth. Half-way through his sixth year, he'd been captured on one his hunting expeditions. They'd set a trap for a couple of Order members and caught him by mistake. Lucky them. Things had gotten a little rough and when the red haze of fury passed, Harry came back to himself to find that he'd pretty much slaughtered half a dozen Death Eaters with his bare hands.

One had hidden. One had thought he could get away. He hadn't. Harry remembered killing _that_ one. How good it felt. He couldn't pretend to ignore the changes in himself after that. Faster, stronger. Quicker to hurt, quicker to kill.

Harry hadn't lost control since that incident, no matter how much he may have wanted to. He'd shoved that hungry, aberrant side of himself into the furthest recesses of his mind and pretended his damnedest that it wasn't there, wasn't a part of him, wasn't something gluttonous with velvet fur and black scales that rubbed up against his insides and purred when he killed or when he fucked his latest conquest into the mattress.

"Honesty," the first maulk whuffed softly, the words sprinkled with faint laughter. "I appreciate that."

The fey beast didn't seem the least bit bothered that Harry had killed its companion. "Who are you?" Harry asked tiredly.

It picked up a paw and licked it delicately. "I am Daughter of Grimaulkin," it purred, pink tongue disappearing again behind a fanged grin. "Keeper of the North Gate."

"Then greetings to you, Keeper," Harry replied, nodding to the maulk as he wiped the blade off in the snow and sheathed it. "Will you block my way again?"

"No, wee Morrigan," the Keeper mewled. "I shan't."

There was a creaking of rusted hinges behind him. A tall Sidhe girl stood in the doorway. Green of both hair and eye, she wore a grey dress of Grecian design that fell to her ankles in soft folds. She was pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way and when she smiled, Harry saw that her teeth were as green as her hair and as sharp as a piranha's.

"My Lady is waiting for you," she said, her voice sweet and rich. She raised an arm, gesturing towards the doorway. "Please, right this way."

Harry glanced over his shoulder at the maulk. "I apologize for the death of your companion."

The maulk grinned, fangs aplenty. "He was foolish. I am not. He shall make a nice meal for later."

Harry shuddered and waved the girl in front of him to continue.

The girl ducked her head in supplication and led him through the doorway.

Through the door was a small antechamber that opened into a large room the size of the Great Hall. The walls were swathed in rich indigo velvet, pale light gleaming from luminous crystal sculptures; the room vibrated with a chill, subtle resonance. Something beneath his skin shivered with pleasure. _Home,_ it cried. _Home!_

Beautiful fae, both male and female lounged on elaborate couches, beings that seemed ideal in feature and form. Gods and goddesses almost. But Harry could see the unique oddities that set the winter Sidhe apart from their summer cousins. Some of the fae gathered wore their hair dyed sapphire-blue, and others wore braids of silver, mossy green and violet. Cold light glittered from jewellery set into ears, brows, and even lips. Gems dripped from their skin. Clothing pushed the boundaries of temptation. There was a hypnotic swirl of colour in the air, gathering around each of the fae, a pretty nimbus of cold blues and violets and greens.

The dark energy of his magic hummed around these beings and rose within him like a wave. It swirled under and over his skin, making him wonder if he too, had whirling aura of colour around him.

The faint tinkle of the conversation and laughter of the Winter Court faded as Harry walked in, oblique green eyes turning to him. It made him feel like he was walking a supernatural gauntlet and should he fail, these pretty creatures would rise up in droves, tearing him apart with fingers like knives and tongues like swords. But they were silent. Their gazes were speculative, judging, sometimes appreciative, and occasionally curious and even a few that seemed uneasy of his presence.

Harry followed the Sidhe girl past the gathered fae to what looked like an inner courtyard. Enormous firs reached up into the blackness of the night sky, frost clinging to their branches. The snow beneath their feet glowed with moonlight, though there was no moon that Harry could find. The chill, blue gloom sat heavy here, broken only by a tall, spindly lamppost under which an ornately wrought bench sat half-covered in snow, the crystalline glitter of icicles hanging from its decorative coils.

A banner hung from the lamppost; long and thin, it billowed in the wind revealing a simple snowflake edged in silver on a deep lazuline background. Looking closer, Harry could see a white vine with heavy needle-like thorns choking the flared edges of the snowflake.

"You are one of my Lady's creatures and you haven't even seen her standard before?" the young fae asked amused.

"No," he replied. "I haven't."

One of the woven ties broke from the lamppost, banner flying free in the wind, the long, slim tails on the bottom of the pennant licking out at Harry's fingers like a dragon's tongue. Harry reached out and captured the trailing fork before it could get stuck on the silver coils of the bench. It felt like silk. Judging from the ragged ends on the banner it wasn't the first time it had gotten caught.

"Why do you ask?" he inquired as he ran the silk through his fingers. Harry turned to the Sidhe girl.

Her mouth hung open in a small, pink 'O' as she stared at the banner.

It had changed. The indigo deepened into a black so dark it seemed to swallow the light itself. A full yellow-white moon rose where the snowflake had sat, a rearing thestral with silver-white eyes and wings ready for flight lay over it; at its feet were a silver-gilt dagger and wand crossed over a black rose in full bloom. The heart of the rose had a vivid purple tinge that bordered on ultraviolet. Upon closer inspection he realized the thestral wasn't a thestral at all, but some kind of hell beast by the curling black ram's horns on its head and the razor-sharp predator's teeth in its maw.

He recognized the banner. It was the crest of the Sharr Family. More of Mab's tricks. He'd known she was yanking him around from the moment he'd spotted her in the Dursley's kitchen, Harry just hadn't known _why_. Now he did.

Fury shook him. All his life he'd been subject to others' whims; now it seemed he'd become the plaything of something that made nightmares shiver in their boots. Bitterness was a sour note on the back of his tongue.

"What is this?" Silk crumpled in his fingers and he barely recognized his own voice under the thick, gravelled snarl it had become. _"What is this?"_

Her eyes were wide and frightened. "Your standard, my lord," she breathed, sinking to her knees, grey skirts spread out on the snow like a rain cloud around her. She bowed her head so low it almost touched the ground. "Mercy, my lord," she murmured, soft and reverent. "Please, have mercy."

His hands still shook with anger, but it fought for dominance now with confusion. "What is your name?"

"Fiona, my lord," she replied, head still bowed.

"Fiona, then," Harry said. A muscle in his jaw drew tight and began to tic, the banner wrapped tight around his fist, his fury at Mab's games waiting to escape his control. "Will you lead me to Mab? With _haste_, if you please."

She rose and curtseyed to him. "Yes, my lord."

"Thank you."

Fiona rushed through the tall firs, seeming to flit lightly over the snow. Through the trees loomed a tall black tower and an enormous set of stairs before a dark arching hallway. The stairs were huge, big enough that Harry felt ant-like in the face of their colossal size and the black ice beneath his feet held shifting hues of amethyst, pale green and ruby.

The hallway was formed from the same black ice as the stairs; figures were carved in rich bas-relief upon its surface. A pair of dragon's eyes stared balefully from between the frostbitten branches of a scraggly tree. Bones, human bones were piled around it and little demonic creatures writhed and snarled within its roots, tiny faces filled with malicious glee. The tree itself held a long, warped visage twisted into a scream. Teeth poked out from the bark and a pair of large feline eyes stared back at Harry; there was too much personality behind those beseeching eyes and he wondered who the carving had been before they were transformed. An echo of a whisper-soft scream ghosted across the edges of his hearing and that was enough to make him turn away with a wince.

The other side of the hallway was thick with stalactites and stalagmites, looking like rows of great blackened teeth. Harry hurried to catch up with Fiona's rapidly disappearing figure.

At the end of the hallway, a pair of vast ivory doors opened into darkness. Fiona stood beside them and bowed to him. "Welcome, my lord, to Arctis Tor."

Harry glanced warily at her as he passed. He hadn't gotten more than twenty feet in when the doors shut with nary a whisper leaving him in total blackness.

"You're really working the old school thing today, O Queen of all that's dark and spooky," he growled.

He could hear his own breathing like thunder it was so quiet. "At least horror films give me the dignity of suspense music beforehand."

There was no answer.

"Where the fuck are you?" he yelled, his own voice bouncing off of unseen walls and reverberating back to him.

"I should cut your tongue out for such disrespect," said Mab conversationally, her sultry tones echoing out from nowhere at all. "But then again, I do find your mouth so _very_ entertaining."

"Your cheap theatrics are a bit overdone, _my lady_," Harry replied mockingly. It was a childish thing to say, but he had reached the end of his patience.

Light flooded into the chamber and Harry found himself staring nose to nose with the Winter Queen. "Why fix what isn't broken?" she murmured charmingly, green eyes glittering with amusement.

Harry jerked backwards in surprise and landed on his ass in front of her.

He found himself sitting on a raised dais in which he'd just narrowly missed falling off of; Mab lounged on an elaborately decorated throne made of silver and ice and draped with luxurious white furs. Her crisp business suit was replaced by a set of loose linen trousers in dove grey and a men's white silk button down, sleeves rolled to the elbows, slender wrists unadorned, and her hair fell loose over her shoulders. A pair of long, spear-like diamond earrings glittered in the light, drawing attention to where the shirt's collar fell away from her graceful neck.

She hadn't bothered to button it all the way. It was... distracting.

Mab propped her chin up on her hand, an incongruously girlish gesture and watched him with a small smile on her face.

Harry blinked stupidly. "I keep forgetting how much your kind likes playing tricks on people."

Mab lifted a shoulder carelessly, fey green eyes blinking slowly with amusement, mulberry lips curling into a smug smile. "It was harmless, save to your pride."

"I suppose this is revenge?" Harry replied, climbing to his feet. He was lucky to have missed the stairs - it was a ways down to the empty chamber below.

"Revenge?" She lifted one perfectly arched brow, eyes flickering blue-white for a moment. "Nonsense," she replied. "That was purely for my pleasure." Mab leaned forward, capturing his gaze. "If I didn't like your attitude, I wouldn't have brought you back with it."

Harry suppressed the urge to run out of the room screaming, refusing to let his expression fill with the rapidly escalating unease that was churning in his gut. "Yeah, about that..."

She smiled and this time it held none of her previous cheer. "All in due time."

"All in due time?" he repeated bewilderedly. "You gave me the impression I didn't have much time."

"Did I?" she murmured, looking very unapologetic. "Oh how awful. Could you possibly find it in yourself to forgive me?" Mab reached out and brushed a thumb against a wet spot on his cheek he hadn't noticed. Her nails were painted an opalescent white and they were exceedingly long and exceedingly _sharp_. She pulled her hand back and Harry saw a glint of blue-green blood on the side of her finger.

"I see you've met the Keeper," she said, rubbing the bead of blood between her fingers. "I do hope you left her in one piece."

He rubbed the end of his sleeve over his cheek. "I didn't hurt her," he rejoined. "But her companion attacked me and I had to defend myself." He paused and a piece of the puzzle fell into place. "Why do I get the feeling that your emissary set me up?"

"Ming Lai is easily prone to jealousy," Mab said dismissively. "Her mood changes as swift as the winter sea."

Harry gritted his teeth on what he wanted to say. His temper was hanging on by the bare shreds of his control and it was only the knowledge that he had about as much chance to lay a finger on Mab as a mouse did to a tiger.

"Why?" he asked her. "Why would she have anything against me?"

Mab lift a shoulder in a careless shrug. "Why would I know what motivates her whims?" She tilted her head at him and there was a glitter in her eye that made Harry think she was laughing at him. "Why don't you ask her yourself?"

It hit him suddenly. Nothing happened here without Mab's knowledge. It wasn't the emissary that set him up. It was Mab.

"Why did you want them to attack me?"

Mab's lips parted in a smile. "It was a test," she replied. "And you passed it with flying colours."

Harry bared his teeth at her. "A test of what? My loyalty? My... _capability_?"

"I wanted to see what you could do." She gave him an oblique look from under her lashes. "I'm surprised though..."

He didn't like the sound of that, how smug she sounded. "By what?" he said flatly, more tired than angry.

"That for all of your vaunted control, you are always a hairsbreadth away from loosing your temper."

For a being with absolutely no care for human emotions, she was uncomfortably adept at reading him. Harry's fist tightened convulsively around the banner. "Speaking of tests, I wonder what you could tell me about this." He forced his fingers to let go of the bedraggled silk and the pennant fluttered down to rest on Mab's lap.

She sat up straight and smoothed the crumpled silk against her thigh, crinkles easing from the banner's folds. "Congratulations on your ascension, Lord Sharr." Mab looked up and there was the gleam of malice and laughter in her face. "It is, after all, a prestigious position."

Harry gazed back passively, mind drawing a total blank.

The Faerie Queen picked up the banner and tucked a fold of the silk into the waistline of his jeans, her cool fingers causing him to shudder. He wasn't sure if it was desire or disgust. Mab watched and smiled. "Why would I lie?"

_'You can't,'_ he thought. _'The Sidhe can't lie.'_

"You know more than what you're telling me," Harry countered. "No more games, no more riddles. What do you want with me?"

"I want a lot of things," she murmured unhurriedly. "But mostly I desire your loyalty."

"Last time I checked," Harry answered warily, pulling the cold silk from his belt and shoving the banner into his jacket pocket. "I didn't have much choice in the matter."

"Oh but you do, Harry. You can give your allegiance to me freely," Mab said, green eyes hooded and shining in the light like a cat's. "Or I can take your will from you as I please."

"I see," Harry replied, the flesh on the back of his neck wanting to crawl away. The memory of what happened in the Dursley's kitchen was forever seared in his brain. Anger sparked uselessly in him. He was furious at his lack of a choice, and it was impotent fury at best: as if by being angry, he could be proactive. Fat chance of that, he thought, when his world was falling apart faster than he could put the pieces back together again.

"Do you?" she said, white brows rising in question.

The words fell out before he could stop them. "When did I make a deal with you?"

_'When would I be _stupid_ enough to make a deal with _you_?'_

Mab smiled. Mab smiled and Harry swallowed back a moan. There were dead things in that smile. There were wailing, hungry things in that smile; there were razor teeth and the sharp wet sounds of bone being broken. "Oh my," she purred. "Do you mean to tell me that you truly don't remember?"

Fear curled its claws into him. His hands shook and God, he hoped she hadn't noticed. "Yes," he told her, voice thin and faint.

She laughed, bright and bell-like, her slit-pupiled eyes heavy and smug with satisfaction. "You were desperate." Mab tilted her head and grinned, mulberry lips stretched wide over sharp, white teeth. "You were confused, didn't understand why, why you were dead, why the world had suddenly up and passed you by, marching full force towards its inevitable destruction."

He looked away. Somehow, she'd stripped everything from him, left him bare and bleeding.

She crooked her finger and drew him down to her with no more than a flash of green eyes under heavy lashes, the expectant promise of sensual release writ in her body. He knelt before her, close in the V of her thighs. Mab's lush mouth curled into a smirk and she leaned into him, too close, too familiar. Heat pooled low into his belly, want suddenly singing through his veins. He shivered, this time with pleasure and leaned into her touch like a great cat butting his head against her palm. "You were angry," she murmured into his ear, breath cool and smelling of bitter mint.

She smiled and he could feel the drag of her lips catching on the skin of his neck. "And oh so _willing_ to throw your soul away for the same people who never even cared about you in the first place."

Desire turned sour and Harry flung himself away, disgusted with his own reaction, her nails drawing red scores in his jaw. "You crazy _bitch_!"

Mab laughed and slouched carelessly back into the furs of her throne, knees spreading wide and inviting as she licked his blood from her fingers. "Truly, Harry, I've been called much worse for much less."

The demon thing that looked like a thestral, but wasn't, stared off the silken folds at him, eyes white and feral. "You would turn me into a puppet for your own twisted needs?" Harry growled.

"Never. If I want you to do something, you will be aware, fully cognizant of your actions and hating yourself every step of the way because you did it, not for me," she added, an arrogant tilt to her chin. "But because you wanted to." Her lips curled, skin drawing tight over the bones of her face, something fanatical and not quite sane lighting her from within. "You wanted to hurt them. You still do. I'm just giving you the means to an end. _Embrace it_, Harry. Hate is a beautiful thing."

Harry lost it. "Stop talking in _riddles_!" His voice reverberated off of the chambers walls and the noise bouncing back at him didn't sound anywhere _near_ human. It was enough to put a stopper in anything else he might have said.

She spoke, cool and calm after his outburst, disdain dripping from her words. "I want you to do me a favour. And in turn I will tell you what you want to know."

Shame welled within him at how low he would go to find answers. "What will it cost me?" he replied, wary of Mab's trickster nature.

"Nothing you haven't already paid."

A muscle in Harry's jaw began to tick. "Do I have a choice?" he bit out.

Mab raised an eyebrow, a curiously human gesture. She smiled, slow and sly, all honey and poison. "No. You don't."

"What is the favour?" said Harry, making it into less of a question and more of a thinly veiled command to answer him this time instead of asking a riddle in return.

Her smile never wavered. "I want you to bring back the Lords of Magic."

Harry didn't know where to begin. The Lords of Magic were a fairy tale. A gruesome and bloody fairy tale filled with sex, scandal and a number of other things not appropriate for a bedtime story, but still, a fairy tale. Or, at least he had thought it was, seeing as how he stood before a rather malignant character of myth and obscurity herself.

Though the names had evolved and changed and fallen from use, the stories had not. Legend held that the Lords of Magic were beings of the Old World, remnants of a previous civilization. It was said that they walked among Wizardkind's ancestors as gods, bestowing gifts of language, art, and knowledge amongst a group of people not long removed from scratching in the dirt with tools of wood and bone, shell and stone. They predated the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Mesopotamian Empires of the fucking cradle of civilization. Hell, if legend was to be believed, they were the only reason why the written word came into being.

The Lords of Magic were divided up into twelve houses, six Light, six Dark, and most of them dead and gone. They had originally scattered themselves over the continents with enough room in between not to rub elbows with each other, small wizarding communities springing up in their wake. Current rumours placed two surviving Families in the Americas, another in Italy, and the last on the island of Cyprus.

"You're fucking joking, right?" Harry said in disbelief, scorn dripping from his words. It would be just like her to dangle his freedom on a string, and then yank it away just as he was beginning to hope.

There was a different note in her smile now, not the cruel amusement of before but something different, something enigmatic and satisfied, like he'd walked straight into a trap of his own making. "They are not as dead as the world would like to believe, only lost and misplaced."

"You want me to bring back a damn near god-like group of wizards. Forgetting the impossibility of the task for the moment, you're going to have to give me something better than that to work with," Harry bit out, words taking on a staccato tempo in his frustration.

"Sit."

Cold light swirled in his mind. He was on his knees again, boots digging uncomfortably into his ass as he knelt like an eager student at her feet.

"Your father's family," she began. Flicker quick, a little sneer crossed her mouth and was gone so fast that Harry though he had imagined it. " – has long served Summer's whims. Your mother's family – "

Harry interrupted her. "My mother was Muggleborn."

Her lips curled with distaste. "Your mother was anything but Muggleborn. Your mother was the lost scion of the Sharr Family. And you, Harry, are the Heir."

"Bullshit!" Harry spat, voice bouncing off the chamber wall.

The smug smile was back. "I tell you no lies. Your father was nothing more than Summer's puppet. A talented wizard, oh yes, but still, just a wizard. Nothing more, nothing less. Your mother's family, though, that makes you special."

The puzzle pieces were coming together. She'd given him all of the clues, little hints as he'd come along and it was all there right under his nose. His mind whirled to put all of the scattered bits of information together.

Mab never would have pulled him out of that hellish future if he didn't mean anything more than the end of the world. End of one of her playgrounds, sure, but there was more to it than that. The knowledge he had of his father was scant at best and he'd never known that the Potters were vassals of Summer. Hell of a thing for him to find out one day with a fairy knocking on his door and demanding he do her bidding. But Mab wasn't concerned with his father's connection to Summer, Mab was interested in his mother, his mother's side of the family and through that, him as well.

His mind hurt from the implications, from the idea that _he_ was the Heir to something that made Voldemort and his Death Eaters look like children playing at Cops and Robbers.

She'd found him, had probably been watching him for quite some time before making her move, presenting him with such a tempting offer, the idea of going back and fixing his mistakes – such an enticing proposition, especially when he had no other options. Clever, very clever. It was like showing a thirsty man an oasis when he was surrounded by hot sun and burning desert. Only for Harry to find out it was an illusion when he went to drink and found himself pouring sand instead of water down his throat.

She wanted Harry because of his connection to the Lords of Magic. The Families were powerful enough that whoever had them on their side would inevitably tip the balance in their favour. Mab wanted allies. And Harry, bearing his guilt like weights around his neck, had walked pretty as he pleased right into her trap. He'd sold himself to her for a chance to drink at her illusion and then she'd wrapped the shackles of ownership around his wrists without him being any the wiser of it.

Harry couldn't remember most of what happened before he died, let alone making a deal with the devil. She could tell him that the grass was blue and the sky was green and he would have to take her word for it because he didn't know better. Couldn't prove better.

"I am the key." Harry kept his words neutral and carefully modulated, but he knew his eyes were burning with the knowledge of what she'd done to him. "I am the key to the door you wish to open. But I am only _one_ key; you need five others. You need the other five Dark Families in order to open that door. And you need the six Light Families – and Titania – to balance out what will happen when you open that door."

The sound of clapping filled the chamber, Mab's eyes lit by the blue-white glimmer of Winter's aether, the eerie light glittering on the long diamonds of her earrings. "Well done, Harry." She smiled and Harry felt the black maw of despair clamping down on him. "Well done."

* * *

It was chaos inside the Ministry, the general public crowding in amongst Ministry employees and heckling reporters. The raucous mob filled the air with loud shouting and the threat of violent hexes, the red-robed forms of Aurors dispersing amongst the crowd to try and restore order. From what Shorner could see of their struggles, they were about as useful as wings on an ostrich.

Shorner shifted Lily Potter's files under his arm as he stepped into the lift past the teeming crowd. Sirius Black had escaped and a right mess ensued; Shorner didn't know how the wizarding community had found out so soon. Black had only disappeared from Azkaban just four hours ago.

'_This is beyond insane,'_ he thought as he exited the lift. Shorner strode through the maze-like hallways of the Department of Mysteries towards the secluded calm of his office. Things inside the DoM were no different from the rest of the Ministry. Dropping the files on his desk, Shorner collapsed into his chair.

He spent most of the previous night writing up a report on his findings of the Sharr family. Shorner was sure Crevan had put word into his superior's ear that he had found some disturbing news connected to the Veil.

This was not good. Matter of fact, this whole situation was not good. The man chuckled wryly, rubbing his temples in a futile attempt to ward off the encroaching headache from caffeine withdrawal. The Ministry was going to Hell in a hand basket and Shorner didn't have the slightest clue where to begin plugging up the leaks. Information of such a sensitive nature as Black's escape _never_ should have gotten out. Add in how quickly the public knew about his breakout and all signs pointed to someone within the Ministry, someone _trusted_, deliberately selling out confidential information.

A short knock on Shorner's door shook him from his thoughts. "What?" he barked out, the request slipping out sharper than he'd intended.

One of the aides poked her head around the door. "Mr. Shorner, the Heads of Mission Operatives and British Wizarding Security would like to see you in the conference room."

_Bugger._ And with Black's escape on top of all of this…

He sighed and gathered up the stack of files haphazardly strewn about. "Thank you, Maggie."

The petite brunette blushed. "No problem, Mr. Shorner," she said as she scuttled out the doorway in front of Shorner.

The conference room lay all the way across the DoM from Shorner's office and he nearly ran there just to arrive relatively on time. Shorner took a moment to catch his breath and straighten his robes while the aide went inside to announce him.

"Mr. Shorner, would you please be so kind as to join us?" came the voice of the Head of Mission Operatives.

Shorner stepped into the dimly lit room and found that all five of the other Heads of the DoM sat inside. He sucked in a nervous breath of air and sat in the seat provided at the far end of the table.

The Head of British Wizarding Security tilted her steel grey head to the side and looked him over. "You seem a bit young for a Headship."

Shorner gritted his teeth and smiled. "I can assure you of my qualifications and my capability in doing my job, Madam Mallard," he replied in a not so subtle jibe at her not being able to prevent Black's breakout.

She bristled visibly and seemed to be on the verge of saying something rather unkind when the Head of Mission Operatives interrupted her.

"Shorner is quite proficient at his job and we are not here to dispute that," Conner Blackwood said brusquely, seemingly at the end of his patience. "Now, back to pressing matters, we normally get Field Surveillance to debrief us on these things, but you seem to have the most information on hand of us all. Would you care to share your conclusions on the occurrence with the Veil?"

Shorner took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Speaking in front of this powerful a group of people left his knees feeling a little weak. "I do not have tangible evidence with me at the moment, but late yesterday morning between 0800 and 1100 hours the Veil went active and stayed that way for three continuous hours before subsiding back into stasis."

Shorner didn't have to be a genius to know that the majority of the scepticism writ on his audience's faces was more from the Veil's history of strange fluctuations and the distaste surrounding its past uses than the veracity of the information he'd gathered. "Further research yielded that an unknown magical signature had passed through the Veil into this world during those active hours. After additional scrutiny, we managed to match the signature to a Mr. Harry James Potter."

"_The_ Harry Potter?" asked Madam Mallard incredulously.

Shorner nodded. "One and the same."

Murmurs of unrest flittered through the conference room.

He glanced around the room at the eyes pinned on him. The veritable bomb was about to be dropped on the group and Shorner wanted to be far away from the fallout. "While researching Mr. Potter's family history for a connection that would explain the Veil's reaction, I stumbled onto some… rather _alarming_ information. Within a single generation, I was able to trace his mother's line back to the Sharr Family as sole offspring and Heir."

The din the five Heads created was deafening.

"….I don't care if all evidence points to the contrary, it's not possible!" the Head of Counter Intelligence yelled to Gale Brightfall of Field Surveillance. A ringing silence descended over the room.

The Head of Analysis and Tactical Specialists turned and looked at Shorner through heavy, dark eyes. "Are you saying that Harry Potter is a Sharr Lord?"

Shorner nodded. "All evidence points to it, so yes."

"Do you perceive him to be a threat in the near or immediate future?"

Shorner sighed and resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, headache worsening by the second. "The boy will be thirteen two weeks from today and normally I'd say don't worry about it. Progeny does not necessarily mean ontogeny. But on the other hand, his magical signature held some fairly disquieting information."

Conner interlocked his fingers in front of his face. "I get apprehensive when you of all people say, "disquieting". Let's keep it short and simple, Shorner. I'd like to know if I have to alert the Director of Magical Law Enforcement of any other menaces to society _today_."

"Harry Potter's signature shows all the signs of a consistent, long term use of illegal, advanced dark magic. That kind of practice is typically indicative of a _very_ capable sorcerer of the Dark Arts." Shorner licked his lips and decided to plunge ahead. "We have also not been able to track him or his wand as of 1830 hours yesterday evening."

The glimmer of hope disappeared in the Head of Mission Operative's eyes. "I'll have someone bring him in as soon as possible. Ladies, gentlemen, this meeting is adjourned."

* * *

A large dark shape sprinted alongside the gravel road. The dog was thin to the point of emaciation and its fur was matted and patchy. But it ran with a desperate need, of something long past simple devotion. The gleam in its eyes was wild, driven and obsessed – too intelligent, too _human_ to be mere canine.

'_I'm coming Harry," _the animagus thought. _'He won't hurt you anymore! I'll kill him, I'll kill that rat!' _


	7. Intro to Chaos

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Six

Intro to Chaos

Harry sat dazed and numb at his desk at Privet Drive, summer storms washing the grime from his window. There was a package wrapped in white silk sitting before him. Any second now, he'd reach out and undo the ornate knot holding the affair together, but something told him that once he did, he'd never be able to go back.

Someone once told him, "…sometimes you're the bug, and sometimes you're the windshield." Harry had a sinking suspicion that his life was taking on more of the point of view of the bug than what he was comfortable with.

He pressed the heel of his hands into his eyes.

The throbbing in his head had upped the intensity to which Harry was sure that a tiny version of himself was valiantly assaulting the side of his skull with a Kalashnikov in a vain attempt to be let out. He was also sure that small version of himself was the one that did the panicked screaming whenever something pulled a wobbly. It was the part of him that had been gibbering incoherently for the past twenty-four hours. Harry sighed and laid his head against the cool wood of the desk. At this particular moment, he wanted nothing better than to crawl under a rock and sleep for a very long time. If he never woke up, it would be too soon.

The sense of being overwhelmed had drained the energy to protest from him and the long muscles of his legs started to shake in nervous, exhausted tension.

How was he going to achieve this task? How could _one_ person ever try and bring back an ancient circle of magical families – even if that person _was _supposed to be the Heir one of those ancient magical families. It was absurd, not to mention impossible. Harry was a soldier – a mercenary, at best – not a politician.

Harry let out a soft huff of laughter. "Fuck this shit." Pulling the knot apart, he carefully pulled the silk from around the package.

It was a book. An old book. A book bound in an odd brackish-green leather with a tarnished silver clasp and worn ivory pages where the gilt edging had worn away. There was no title and when Harry ran his fingers over the buttery-soft leather of the spine, the silver clasp popped open with a decisive _click_.

The pages were as thin as rice paper and the handwriting changed styles, ink, and even languages several times. He couldn't read most of it, but what little he did recognize seemed to be a history of the Sharr Family. In the back of the book was a family tree, the names and dates written in black and purple ink. A beautifully rendered sketch of the Sharr crest sat in the lower corner with the words "IN VITA EST NEX" written underneath.

"Life is violent," Harry remarked under his breath. "How fitting."

He dropped the book onto the desk and leaned back into his chair, idly running his knuckles over his lower lip. There were so many things wrong with his situation he didn't know where to begin. Harry lifted his wrist and studied the iridescent bindings Mab had placed on his skin. There were now identical bracelets of runes running around both wrists; after his little revelation of her plans, Mab had completed the second half of the deal by binding him to the agreement. Should he complete her fantastical task, she would release Harry from her service.

Yeah fucking right. He knew better. Mab would do everything in her power to make sure he never slipped her leash. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.

Swearing violently under his breath, he shoved his chair back and stood up, accidentally knocking the forgotten Sharr book off the edge of the desk.

The book landed upright on the ends of its pages and a peculiar sense of déjà vu flittered along the edges of his mind. Harry bent over and picked it up. A crisp, white envelope fluttered from between the pages of the book onto the chair. He frowned and put the book aside. Inside the envelope was a plane ticket to Brazil from Miami. Its date indicated it had been recently bought, that day in fact.

Mab's rich, heavy perfume clung to the ticket.

Harry bared his teeth in a feral slash of a smile. "You are one _twisted_ bitch," he said to the empty room, knowing in his gut that somewhere, Mab was laughing at him.

He knew what waited for him in Brazil.

Mab's bait on a fucking string.

La Muerte.

The necromancer.

Unfinished business.

* * *

London's Heathrow airport was packed full of noisy, soaked patrons. Voices rose over him in a roar of sound as he walked through the entrance. Harry shook his rain-wet hair out of his eyes and made his way over to the queue in front of the ticket counter. The elderly lady in front of him slipped on the slick, wet floors and Harry reached out to steady her out of instinct.

She smiled gratefully and patted him on the arm. "Why thank you young man. Most people wouldn't have bothered."

"It wasn't a problem, Madam," he replied, dipping his head to her in respect and offering his arm for her to lean on. With her poise and pearls and tailored, understated clothing, Harry judged her to have come from serious money.

The wrinkles around her faded blue-green eyes crinkled with good humour. "Such a polite one too. Where are you headed?"

Harry smiled wryly. "Brazil."

"Oh how interesting!" She remarked, a glint of interest sparking her expression. "Are you a student?"

"Of a sorts," he said amicably, winking at her. "I never stop learning."

There was a different smile on her face now and it held a note of sardonic humour that hadn't previously shown amongst her pleasantries. "I see."

Harry blinked at her as the line moved up. "See what?"

Her eyes glittered with laughter. "Tell me," she began pleasantly. "Is it the blondes or the brunettes that draw you there?"

Harry flushed with colour as her implications hit him. "Ah, I understand what you're getting at now." He grinned at her. "I'm afraid it's nothing quite so… _adventurous_. Just catching up with an old acquaintance. I'm curious to see how the years have treated him. Where are you headed?"

"Greece," she replied. "I hear it's not as soggy as England."

"Right," Harry drawled, grin creeping up behind the faux-serious expression. "And the half-naked, well-built, well-oiled Greek men have nothing –"

She clicked her tongue disapprovingly, laughter glinting in her eyes. "Bite your tongue." The wizened old lady stepped up to the counter and quickly negotiated a ticket. She spared a smile for Harry as she disappeared into the crowd.

The queue pushed him forward. 'Felicia' read the stewardess's nametag. She smiled flirtatiously at him when it was his turn and tried flipping her hair over one shoulder, but seemed that the blonde mass was too stiff to do much more than flop half-heartedly back into place.

"Where to?" she chirped.

The left corner of Harry's mouth quirked upwards. "One ticket for the 2:30 flight to Miami please."

* * *

Whoever said Brazil was a great place to vacation had neglected to mention a few things. Harry was under the distinct impression that a vacation should _not_ include a flak jacket, side-arm, half a gallon of bug repellent and a portable air conditioning unit. If the drug cartels didn't get you, the mosquitoes would. The Amazon was wetter than a well-paid whore and for that matter, it was hot as hell. Night had descended a while ago bringing with it no respite from the muggy heat, only the sound of thousands of tiny, biting, stinging insects. How anybody could want to live here was beyond Harry.

Harry crouched silently in the dark mud by the jungle compound. One wrong move and he was likely to get his head blown off, be it by Muggle or magical methods. La Muerte, the necromancer, was paranoid enough to make the trigger-happy Italian hit wizards look like fairly pleasant people to be around.

Upon his arrival to Miami, Harry purchased new clothes and equipment. The wards around the compound were sensitive enough to pick up magic from ten miles away. Harry's clothes and weapons had been virtually saturated with magic simply by being around him day after day. He was lucky Julius Strome had come up with the anti-tracking device on such short notice; a tiny pewter charm shaped like a compass hung on a cord around his neck and it was probably the only thing that kept his magical signature from appearing like a bloody beacon. The magic he used, on the other hand, left a slight residue and there wasn't much he could do about that.

La Muerte was one of Voldemort's first allies. No one actually knew how old he was or even his real name. Speculation said that he was born almost five hundred years ago, the bastard son of a Spanish Noble wizard and a Portuguese servant girl.

Last time around, the necromancer made a name for himself by resurrecting the dead Light fighters and employing them in the use against the resistance forces. He had also been the mastermind behind several sabotaged operations, including –

Fuck, had it really only been a few days ago?

_"The truth is never bliss." The necromancer smiled, dark eyes still as cold as ice. "Easier to live in self-centred solipsism than to acknowledge the hard facts of our failures, isn't it?"_

_"You say such sweet things to me. I might get all a-flustered here," Harry had mockingly replied in a breathy falsetto. "You're surprisingly talkative today. I didn't know Tom paid you to be friendly."_

_"There's no shame in being sociable." The necromancer spread his hands apart, gesturing to the wreckage around them. "We are titans cut from the same cloth, trapped here together in a desolate Hell. The least we can do is be civil to one another lest we destroy this place any further."_

_Fury had coursed through his veins at the necromancer's casual dismissal of the destruction he had caused. "'Lest we destroy this place any further?' This place? You might as well consider this your finest masterpiece. This is your Hell."_

_The necromancer made a theatrical expression of surprise and affront that lacked any nuance of genuine emotion. "My Hell?" The amused note was back in his voice. "I like this new London. It's beautiful. It's like Christmas and Easter and birthday parties wrapped up into one grand package of pain and rage and hurt."_

_"Must suck, then," said Harry, almost vibrating with tension. "Having me come through and fuck with your sandbox."_

_White teeth flashed in a shark's smile. "Oh Mr. Potter, why would I ever want to kill you when you do a better job of torturing yourself than I ever will? You are a wonderful addition to my… sandbox as you've called it._

_"But let's not quibble over semantics here. I actually enjoy your company. If I had to be trapped with anyone here, I would always, _always_ want it to be you. There is no greater entertainment than watching someone as noble as _you_ poison himself with hatred and destruction."_

Hatred and destruction.

"As you sow, so shall you reap," Harry murmured to himself as he finished wiring the explosive in front of him.

Strategically disguised packs of C-4 littered the sides of the compound and Harry had also managed to bury several land mines in the surrounding jungle under the cover of darkness. The natives, he had found, were quite eager to be rid of the necromancer and would do just about anything to eradicate La Muerte from existence.

The crystals in the pouch tied to his belt jostled slightly as the small bag bounced against his hip. The noise sounded like the loud grinding of teeth and Harry winced at the sound. Those crystals were carved with runes that when activated, would pull up anti-apparation wards across the compound forcing the soldiers inside to run through the mine-laden jungle to escape. As it were, the crystals were just pretty rocks until infused with magic.

Harry crawled like a dark ghost through the underbrush, placing a crystal at each corner of the militarised complex. The fifth he kept, as that would be the one to activate the rest.

Harsh voices ahead of him jabbered to each other in Portuguese. Harry sucked in a breath and crawled behind a large gnarled tree with flat, glossy leaves. He crouched low and cautious; there was a mine positioned a little too close for comfort and Harry didn't think that Mab would be very happy if she had to bring him back again via hamburger style.

The voices came nearer, the deeper of the two saying he saw a bush move near Harry. The guard's footsteps crunched closer to him; he could see the faint moonlight flash off of the dull metal of the AK-47 in the guard's hands.

A jaguar appeared between the thick leaves of a jungle plant. The cat's eyes gleamed green and the great beast slinked forward noiselessly. The voices of the soldiers behind him ceased and Harry's overly sensitised hearing caught the sound of panicked breathing.

"Shoot it! Shoot it!" the man breathed in his native tongue. Harry saw his opportunity and darted out from behind the tree at the two soldiers, feet soundless in the dark earth of the jungle floor.

Harry twisted the first man's wrist while simultaneously ramming his left foot into the man's throat, causing the guard to choke and drop his gun. Pivoting, Harry's right foot surged forward and smashed into the other guard's left kidney. The second man bent over to protect his stomach and Harry pulled a long knife from a shoulder holster, jabbing it upwards under the man's jaw. The man went limp and Harry withdrew the blade, jerking it on the reverse to pierce the back of the first guard's skull.

Harry stepped back to let the large cat move forward.

The jaguar sniffed cautiously at the fallen bodies and for a second, Harry could have sworn that the beast had looked up and grinned a fanged smile at him. An animagus, then. Disgruntled villagers indeed.

Harry grabbed the guard's ID tag that had fallen in the black dirt. There was a military personnel entrance on the side of the building closest to the river. As far as strategy went, the entrance was actually pretty well placed. Anyone who wasn't supposed to be there and/or displeased the necromancer got a short swift plunge into the river to be eaten by piranhas and whatever else lived in those murky waters.

The light next to the door beeped and turned green when Harry swiped the card through the small grey box. Inside the compound walls was a wide courtyard of a strange red clay-like substance. There were also four-dozen well-armed soldiers.

The muted laughter inside the compound abruptly cut off as all heads turned to stare at Harry.

He really should have found a better backdoor.

* * *

_Someone was pounding on the door, thick steel rumbling like thunder. The sound cut through Harry's dream in a cacophony of noise and bloodied colours._

_Twenty-year-old Harry Potter stumbled over to the door, struggling to pull on a pair of jeans as he did so. "What the fuck do you want?" he bellowed into the unfamiliar face. _

_Ronald Weasley's pale, clammy mien appeared over the frightened wizard's shaking shoulders. "Easy there mate. We've got a bit of a problem." Ron's basso tones swept the last bit of sleep from Harry's mind to the cold, nightmarish reality around him. Refugees littered the bunker's corridors; drawn and hollow faces stared back at Harry with something akin to hope in their eyes. _

_Harry wanted to throw up at the sight._

_He swallowed the bile in his throat and glanced back at Ron. The tall redhead was swaying on his feet with what Harry thought to be fatigue. "What happened?"_

_Ron refused to look Harry in the eye. "I don't think I should…I mean, Madam Bones should be the one to…"_

_Harry growled low in his throat. "Ron, look at me. LOOK AT ME!" He grabbed the collar of Ron's white t-shirt and pulled him to face Harry directly. "What. Happened."_

_His friend's gold-flecked blue eyes rolled wildly in his head and Harry could smell the alcohol on his breath. "Fucking hell, man! Pull yourself together! What happened!" _

_A noise like a sob escaped Ron's chest. "They're gone," he whispered breathily. "Mum, Dad, Bill – they're dead. And the twins… the twins were captured by Death Eaters. I don't know if they're still alive."_

_Harry vaguely realized he was shaking. "Where?"_

"They went to save the Ministry. It's gone Harry, the Ministry is gone."

The light was sharp and bright, and it crawled over the inside of his eyelids like a many-legged insect. Harry felt like he'd been run over by a speeding lorry.

"Oye, Gaitito, you've come back to us, no?" The sound of sniggering laughter echoed through his ears. Harry pried his one good eye open. The small, dimly lit room was made out of the same red clay of the courtyard and it was crowded. Strange men with distorted features stood in the shadows; only the gleam of metal and the bright whites of their eyes and teeth let Harry know they were there. La Muerte himself sat on his haunches in front of Harry's chair, fingers crossed thoughtfully under his chin, elbows resting on his knees. The necromancer's dark eyes held a strange reddish light, the colour of dried blood.

Something inside Harry started screaming. _Murder, murder, murder,_ pounded his heart, and Harry wanted nothing more than to sink his teeth into La Muerte's neck and tear his throat out, hot blood dripping down his face. He could almost taste it, all salt and iron and cold satisfaction.

"I don't think this is going to work out between us, John" Harry rasped, licking at the split skin on his lips. "I mean, I've just got so much going on in my life right now and you've got this whole kink thing going on with the ropes, not to mention the age difference. Maybe if things were different, but I'm sorry."

The necromancer smiled. On any other person, it might have been comforting. But on the necromancer it was a cool expression. Tigers with full stomachs wore smiles like La Muerte while watching baby animals play. "Colourful boy. You killed twenty-seven of my men. Forgive me if I'm not in the mood to dither with you," the man said, raising an eyebrow.

"Aw, that's too bad. You seem like a smashing conversationalist."

La Muerte looked Harry over. Harry resisted the urge to shudder as the sensation of dead fingers crawled over his skin. _'How would you feel, Johnny-boy?'_ he thought to himself. _'If I cut off your fingers and stuffed them into your eye sockets?'_

"Who are you?" The necromancer's voice was calm, unaffected, almost bored in it's lack of emotional inflection.

"George Zimmer," Harry drawled, lip curling in a mockery of a grin. "The fashion police are after you."

"Why are you here?"

"My credit card is maxed out and this is the cheapest place I could go for my vacation."

Harry met the necromancer's gaze. A subtle power struggle strained the silence in the small room. Something lay between them, each pushing against it. This was familiar – too familiar.

_Green light flashed past Harry's ear._

_Harry whirled around to face the darkened corner of the warehouse, dropping to one knee and drawing his wand, a spell already illuminating the end. Yellow light arced over his head from Jones' return fire. Another jet of light answered from the corner, green spell splashing off the floor and Harry released his curse. A masked and cloaked Death Eater dropped to the ground from the shadows, blood pooling out of the gash in his throat. The whole thing couldn't have taken more than four seconds._

_"Where did he come from?" Harry muttered, frantically casting his senses out around him. The sleet and snow cut so far down on his senses he might as well be blind. He'd never even sensed the Death Eater, let alone his hexes._

_"Harry…" There was a strange note in Jones's voice._

_Harry turned around and found Harper's limp form crumpled on the dusty floor again, eyes wide and glazed, mouth halfway open like he was just about to say something._

_Jones blinked back at him, startled, the beginnings of fear flitting across his face._

_It took Harry a moment to realize that Harper wasn't breathing, that the wounded keening and the soft spatter of someone's insides dripping from their gut was coming from Francis, and that the popping noise in his ears wasn't firecrackers or the sound his knuckles made when he clenched his fists, but the sounds of multiple Death Eaters Apparating into the warehouse around him._

_And then there was a flare of light behind them._

_And Jonesy's head came off at his shoulders._

Dizziness and something like nausea washed over him. It crawled around in the back of his throat and it yearned to emerge in the form of a scream. The room swirled before his eyes, a nightmarish whirl-a-twirl of too wide, too sharp grins to be human. Black shapes crept around the edges of his vision and a false adrenaline high pushed his stomach up into his throat.

He couldn't do this. He had failed. He hadn't escaped death last time around. Why did he even bother to try? The wizarding world would destroy itself anyway, a series of catastrophic events one right after another.

It didn't matter how hard he tried.

It didn't matter what he did.

It was a sensation that had plagued him since the deaths of most of his friends and now, Harry couldn't bring himself to care anymore.

It was easy let go of the pain that anchored him to the physical world. It was easier than he thought.

The necromancer smiled.

And the world around him abruptly righted itself. Harry sliced the smoky fingers of the necromancer's legilmency attack off before they could sink any deeper into his Occulomency shields.

The urge to laugh bubbled in his throat and slid out as a deep chuckle. "Nice trick, you nearly had me there. Did they teach you that one in the school for Evil Overlords or is it just something you picked up along the way?"

A murderous flicker of irritation lit in the necromancer's eyes.

Harry leaned closer to the necromancer, a heady mixture of adrenaline and dark magic singing in his veins.

"I have one word for you," he whispered, inches away from the necromancer's face. The others in the room didn't matter; they were just canon fodder, things to be used and discarded. His hands itched to run something hard and sharp through the farce of a man in front of him.

There was a wary note in the necromancer's manner that had not been there before. "Please, do share," he said, a false smile of indulgence stretched across his face.

Harry nearly purred. "Boom," he breathed. The lights in the room flickered off and then there was chaos.


	8. Silence of Mayhem

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Seven

Silence of Mayhem

Things never work out the way they should or the way they were planned. It was a constant, sort of like the laws of gravity. When the shit hit the fan, gravity would eventually pull it back down.

Where it landed, now that was the interesting part.

Sirius' overgrown claws rattled steadily against the concrete sidewalk as he trotted through Magnolia Crescent.

So this was where Harry grew-up.

How sickeningly…normal.

For all the interesting inventions the Muggles came up with, it seemed to Sirius that they occasionally suffered from a dire lack of creativity; the humdrum architecture and design of Surrey enforced that fact in his mind. He was also sure he had seen that same colour and model of car in no less than six different driveways.

Sirius desperately hoped Harry had not turned out as boring as Little Whinging, Surrey appeared to be.

He would be about thirteen now; James, at that age, had been so small. One of the shortest boys of their year really, beaten out only by a few Ravenclaws and a lone Slytherin. It had been a major point of contention for James and Sirius grinned at the memories it provoked. The clarity of his mind was not fully restored yet, but the animagus was simply grateful to be rid of the dementors' presence. After twelve years of oppressive silence, broken only by the screaming and incoherent babbling of the other prisoners, anything was a welcome change. Sirius had started to forget what it was like to be around real people, not just old memories and dreams born of delirium.

The depression, which had been circling the point where his thoughts began to fade, dug its claws in with a sudden vengeance. _'Sirius! Old chap, it's good to see you,'_ it chirped gleefully. _'Thinking about James again? Guess what? At the end of your miserable day, he's still dead. You fought with him, remember, two weeks before he was murdered. Slaughtered actually. You heard how the Aurors had a terrible time piecing him back together, didn't you? And to think it was your fault. You, who argued so hard in favour of Peter, you didn't forget that, did you? And how could you, when I am here to remind you. And remind you. And remind you!'_

It laughed and the urge to scream rose in his throat. Maybe if he screamed loud enough, James would take away the voice. He was always so good at making things better. But the voice was right; James wasn't here. James was dead. James was lying six feet below ground level in the Potter family cemetery. _'Potters lie in potter's field.'_

The Grim look-alike shook his head and altered his course for the thick bushes beside a small playground; the shadowy expanse of dreamless sleep soon claimed his waking thoughts.

It was the sharp scent of ozone that woke him.

Dazed and disoriented, Sirius' brain momentarily overloaded from the extreme sensory information. Small hairs prickled along his spine and he had to resist the urge to roll over onto his back, paws up, in the classic pose of submission.

_'Predator!'_

Sirius inhaled sharply through his mouth and the taste of dark magic numbed his tongue and made his teeth ache. Fear was not something Sirius would readily admit to, but whoever – whatever this thing was that reeked of deep black power – he did not want to tangle with it. There were not many things in this world that could make him feel small and powerless and fearful. The few that could were creatures best left to nightmares and history books.

It stepped into the harsh, white glow of the streetlamps.

He was a striking young man of an indiscriminate age and despite his apparent youth, his manner told of a hard-won wisdom and maturity. Lean in his dark jeans and faded t-shirt, the youth moved with a careless, effortless grace, a hunter's cadence to his step, shoulders thrown back, eyes sharp and alert; he carried himself like a killing machine who knew what he was capable of and was perfectly comfortable with it.

And yet, there was something else.

There was something in the youth's feature's that bespoke of a familiarity Sirius desperately did not want to admit.

It was in the glossy, blue-black locks and the finely carved features. It was in the milk-pale skin and the generous curve of his mouth. It was in the raven's wing eyebrows and the wide, canted eyes in a shade of green only found on cats and killing curses.

In the boy that stank of dark magic, Sirius saw the son of Lily and James Potter for the first time in twelve years.

* * *

Harry hadn't wandered the streets of Privet Drive and the surrounding areas since he was fifteen. It was downright eerie to look at the homes filled with people and not see the destruction he remembered.

He knew this was only a placebo for what was really troubling him, but he couldn't bring himself to care. The book about House Sharr sat on his desk back at Number Four, its pages turned back to his family tree. Harry had the oddest sensation that he could still feel the upraised words on the tips of his fingers. There was no doubt of their impression into his mind. Constant movement seemed to ward off the encroaching shock.

How could someone prepare themselves for knowledge that their life, their name, was a lie? Well, not really a lie, but a hell of a lot more elaborate than previously thought. It was a silly question, because no amount of preparing could ever make one ready for having their life turned upside down twice, and counting, in less than a month.

Running a hand through his hair, Harry walked over to one of the aging picnic benches in front of the playground and lay back against the table, limbs sprawled haphazardly.

He was a scion of House Sharr, The Seventh House of the Lords of Magic. The weight of that name was staggering and it made him feel light-headed.

Which was worse, being Harry Potter or being a Sharr? He grimaced and scrubbed his face with his hands, feeling a bit raw on the inside and sure that his sense of self would be shattered come morning. The idea that he had once identified himself as "Just Harry" was laughable and more than a little ironic. His mother wasn't Lily Evans; she was Lily Aideen Sharr, a Lady of House Sharr, a blueblood, an honest-to-God fucking aristocrat. The purebloods were pale imitations in comparison to the Twelve Families.

Had she known? Known who she was? Known that she was the daughter of one of the most infamous dark wizards of modern times? Known that the legacy of the blood running in her veins was older than the concept of time? Known that her heritage lay in deep, black magic? That her mother wasn't a Muggle, but actually a dark veela? The last one Harry shied away from. The possibility that his wants and needs were driven by an insane need to feed off of lust, violence and blood was a little more than his mind could handle at the moment.

Harry wanted to push all of this out of his mind, out of his life. He could run, hide behind any one of his numerous would be scarily easy to wipe himself off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of Harry Potter behind.

But knowing what he did of Mab, she would probably haul him out of whatever hole he was hiding in and set him back on course – if not with a little torture beforehand.

The Sharr name gave him a powerful alias that would lend him standing with the other Lords of Magic and a basis from which he could work with them, fulfilling his part of the bargain with Mab. There was also a pendant that he needed to find; it was something like a family ring, something that would give status to his claims to the Sharr name.

But there was no way in Hell he would let it slip that Harry Potter was also a Sharr Lord. No fucking way. Even in his mind, that particular scenario was nightmarish to the extreme.

And it was giving him a headache.

Harry sat up and pressed fingers against his temples. Fuck, if it didn't feel like he had a meat cleaver buried in his skull.

Logic dictated he move on to the next pressing subject. How was he going to deal with those whom he knew to be Death Eaters and other allies of Riddle? He couldn't treat them all like the necromancer; many of those people were in key places that would require much subtlety on his part to remove them from this world. Blowing shit up was fun and all, but not when you were dealing with individuals like Lucius Malfoy and his ilk. He would have to weaken their power base first, which was easier said then done.

That and he needed clean Hedwig's cage. Birdshit got rank after two weeks in a closed up room. Said owl hooted dolefully at him from her perch in the large oak overshadowing the playground.

Harry grinned wryly. "Sorry I locked you out, girl. At least you didn't get stuck in there."

He felt a little stupid trying to reason with an owl, but it beat waking up in the morning with a half-regurgitated mouse sitting next him on the pillow. The snowy owl spread her impressive wingspan and swooped gracefully onto Harry's knee.

It was odd being back, he mused as he stroked Hedwig's feathers. And it wasn't just the near inconceivable fact that he had travelled back in time. It was the little things, like looking over at his makeshift desk and finding his old glasses and holly wand, both items having been destroyed early on in the war. Things like his photo album and trunk of school supplies, his Gryffindor Quidditch jersey and invisibility cloak – just the simple items made him feel nostalgic. They also made him feel old, because the simple joy that once accompanied them had diminished.

With the war, Harry's meagre belongings became even slimmer. He was sure that he could shove most of his possessions into one small bag with the use of little to no magic; the phrase 'down to the bare essentials' held quite a different connotation for himself than it probably did for most.

Despite the fond memories his before-the-war belongings invoked, he couldn't help but feel weighed down by them. It was a stupid way to think, with an even more ridiculous reason behind it, but his possessions weren't really his. They were the other Harry's, the before-the-war Harry's. His holly wand hadn't worked quite as well as he remembered, hadn't felt quite as comfortable in his hands.

Harry tipped his back and exhaled with a sigh. A light breeze caressed his skin, washing away his thoughts. There was a sort of comfort in watching Hedwig spread her wings and soar against the wind, a bright splash of white in the night sky. He could count on one hand the number of opportunities he had to simply relax and not have to think. He began to nod-off with the alleviation of his headache.

Something shifted in the bushes behind him and Harry reacted on instinct.

He found himself crouched on the ground, wand outstretched, a large hole smoking in the playground foliage, nose to nose with a trembling, Grim-like dog with pale eyes and dark fur.

* * *

Shorner eyeballed the towering stack of papers on his desk with trepidation. This would be the third such stack of papers he had received from both the Muggle and magical government of Brazil.

The Brazilian magical government had found traces of a foreign magical signature along a stretch of land once occupied by a very powerful necromancer. They were inclined to merely write it off as La Muerte having made the wrong person angry; Shorner would as well, if North's tracking charms hadn't said different.

Shorner was coming to regard Harry Potter as an extremely dangerous individual. He had dropped off the grid almost as soon as he'd shown up and other than a few fading traces of magic, the young sorcerer had effectively disappeared. Either he was hiding in the Muggle world or Harry Potter had access to something that could block customary magical tracking – Shorner was operating under the hunch that it was a little of both.

And now, to find out that Potter had simply waltzed into the necromancer's compound and annihilated him…

He shuddered.

What was he trying to do? Become the next dark lord? Merlin knew he had the right kill ratio; in addition to the necromancer, there had been about thirty other wizards of varying calibres and more than one hundred Muggle soldiers within the compound. Where a tropical fortress once stood, there was nothing but ruins and a large, grisly smear on the ground they had determined to be La Muerte himself.

Add into the operating assumption that Harry Potter was also a Sharr Lord and Shorner was beginning to feel like he was holding a very potent mixture in his hands. Should he or should he not tell the Heads the danger level had increased?

He knew he should, there was no way to predict where Potter might strike again – or when for that matter.

The sudden flurry of pounding on his office door startled him from his musings. He hauled himself out his chair to find David North waiting impatiently on the other side.

"The tracking net picked up a high level shredding curse close to the original trace network," he said, breathing heavily, dark circles waning heavy and purple under his eyes. "There's no magical signature attached to it. It's your man."

The exhaustion left as adrenaline began to take its place. "Tell Crevan he has a go-ahead to scoop this bloke up. I want to question this one personally."

* * *

The leaden sensation of anti-apparation wards going up broke the staring contest between himself and his godfather.

Fuck!

Harry reached out and grasped one bony shoulder. "Sirius, I know you have questions, but if you want to keep your mangy arse dementor-free, you'll get yourself to Knockturn Alley and meet me at The Painted Rose. And you will do this without being seen. Do you understand me?"

The emaciated animagus seemed stunned for a moment, but he nodded as well as a dog could and slunk off into the shadows. Sirius was once well on his way to becoming an Auror; he was more than capable of taking care of himself.

Harry crept towards heavy darkness surrounding the oak tree. _'Let's see who are the jokers I'm dealing with now.'_


	9. A Symphony of Bones

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**A/N:** Thanks goes to Jbern for his help and advice with this chapter. The song is Renegade by Styx. Kick-ass song; go download it if you've never heard it.

Chapter Eight

A Symphony of Bones

The man crumpled to the ground, limp and unmoving.

Crouching in the shadows, Harry swiftly stripped the body of its weapons, the motions as natural as breathing. He recognized them now, the blue stripe on black fatigues. They were the Special Forces Unit, a highly militarized division of the Dept. of Mysteries' Mission Operatives. He knew these people, knew their tactics, their habits, the way they moved; Harry had trained alongside them at the tender age of seventeen. Nobody had to teach him how to kill – these people just made sure he was good at it.

And they were after him. The irony of the situation was not lost on Harry. He'd just removed the necromancer as a serious concern and now his own government was out for retribution.

Fear was indeed a strange motivator.

Harry abandoned the body, tucking the stolen kerambit and matte black Colt M1911 away on his person. If these people operated the way the way he remembered them to, they would be tracking him be his magic – which meant they'd been looking for him, probably for some time now judging by how quickly they arrived at the first sign of magic in the area. Hell, he'd walked right into a trap like some wet-behind-the-ears _rookie_.

Harry's teeth ground together in frustration as he jogged through Number 12's backyard. The older couple that lived here were doing extensive renovations of the front garden, moving some of the larger saplings to the back. He had dually noted earlier in the day that they were also using a 20-20-20 high-nitrate fertilizer.

Adrenaline made it easy to rip the lock off the battered wooden shed containing the gardening supplies. Harry tossed two of the dirt-filled bags over his shoulder and took off for the Isuzu parked in the street in front of Number 12.

If they wanted to play that way, that was fine with him.

He could too.

* * *

Crevan, Blackwood's second-in-command, knelt over the still-warm body half hidden by the shrubbery. A quick check of the man's vitals confirmed his death. Well, _fuck_.

His earbud crackled with static. _"Mobil Four and Seven engaged in physical combat in Northwest quadrant. Target still within area."_

"Sighting of target confirmed?"

"_Negative, sir. Assailant unknown."_

* * *

Harry twisted the operative's wand arm down with his right hand while ramming his left elbow repeatedly into the man's solar plexus. Once, twice, three times. He turned, rolling the guy over his arm and hurled him into the agent behind him. The first black-op cracked his head against the side of the house, taking the second agent down with him.

Two short, echoing cracks of the Colt later, Harry melted back into the shadows moving steadily towards the right.

* * *

There were always nine men per team, leader included.

Within the span of seven minutes, three had been killed with no sight of a small thirteen-year-old boy.

Somewhere along the communications line, _someone_ had fucked up monumentally and Crevan didn't trust Shorner enough to know it wouldn't be his own neck this mess would be strung around.

White noise squealed over his earbud and Crevan plucked it out with a grimace. Make that four dead.

Goddamnit! Who the hell did Potter have helping him?

There was a crackle of twigs on his left and a figure of medium height and slim build emerged from the darkness. It was the assailant; it had to be. It was in the way he moved – too smooth, too sure to be civilian. Crevan watched the figure duck past a Muggle vehicle and jog around to the back of the house. He signalled to the rest of his team and followed the man into the shadows.

Number 12 read the house's faceplate. It felt oddly like a death knell.

Crevan rounded the corner of the house just in time to see the shed door swing shut. His team fanned out behind him, weapons poised and ready. No more mistakes with this one. He'd wrap this up, retrieve the boy, write up his report and take a well-deserved break. Piece of cake.

Rustling came from inside the shed and static crackled on the air, like a radio being tuned. A voice faded in from the white noise, a soft, lingering tenor.

"_/Oh momma, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law…/"_

Crevan nodded to the four remaining men around him; they crept forward, using the music to hide their footsteps.

"_/Law man has put an end to my runnin' and I'm so far from my home…/"_

Light and shadows rippled faintly through the bottom of the door. Crevan braced himself against the side of the shed, wand ready to draw, as another team member reached for the door.

"_/Oh momma, I can hear you a-cryin', you're so scared and all a-lone…/"_

The door opened without a squeak, the hinges smooth and oiled. He rolled off the wall into the shed, wand outstretched. It was empty. Boards from the back wall were missing, large enough for a person to slip through. A strip of cloth was tacked up next to the light fixture; it fluttered in the soft breeze, casting shadows over the dirt floor.

Oh. Shit.

"_/Hangman is comin' down from the gallows and I don't have very long…/"_

With a resounding _'Yeah!'_ from the radio, the shed exploded outwards, hurling Crevan backwards with the force of it.

He landed hard on his back and felt white hot agony race up his left arm to wrap around his ribs – it pure luck that he was able to raise a shield in time for the second explosion. The Muggle transportation device behind him vaporized in a fireball of bright heat and sound as a spray of lightning-white projectiles peppered his shield and shredded his not-so-lucky team members. Only one other operative managed to raise a shield. Crevan peered dazedly at the projectiles hammered into the ground, bright spots still dotting his vision.

Nails, those were fucking _nails_!

Crevan hauled himself to his feet, breaking out into sprint towards the end point of the anti-apparition wards, his feet slip-sliding on the wet grass beneath them.

He turned back to see the assailant walk calmly past the burning vehicle and fire a killing curse at the remaining member of his team. This mission had officially gone balls up and Shorner could shove it where the sun didn't shine if he didn't like that. Crevan turned down a darkened alleyway between two rows of houses.

But maybe, just maybe, it could be salvaged. As the assailant appeared at the mouth of the alley, Crevan surged forward.

He twisted the figure's wand arm away from him, causing the curse to go wide. It smashed into a window, glass falling to the ground in a musical shower of fine sharp pieces. The assailant turned into the movement, punching Crevan with his other arm. Crevan rolled backwards with the punch, coming to his feet, lethal spell on the tip of his tongue.

The spell caught him low in the stomach, blasting Crevan off his feet. He landed on his bad arm at the other end of the alleyway. Gasping with pain, he lay there for a moment fighting with unconsciousness. The man moved forward again and Crevan banished one of the muggle vehicles at him.

The grind of warping metal on asphalt sounded like nails on a chalkboard. He watched stunned as the man simply _vanished_ the car. Not losing his momentum, the assailant ran towards him, twisting to avoid Crevan's amber necrosis hex.

Crevan came to his knees, blocking the man's foot from his face. He grabbed the foot and pulled, flinging it upwards.

Instead of losing his balance, the man flipped backwards using the momentum to come up on the balls of his feet. He was fast, too fast and Crevan knew he was outclassed. He blocked Crevan's fist and struck his bad shoulder with a sharp, chopping motion.

Crevan's vision blackened and he wobbled. The assailant's foot surged forwards into his side and Crevan collapsed against a low garden wall, his body beginning to shut down against his will. He fired off one last curse before his wand was snatched from his hand, broken in two by the strength of the man's grip.

The man sized his bad arm and twisted it, bracing his boot against Crevan's back, forcing his body to the ground. He gasped against the dew-wet grass, body folded into an awkward, painful position.

"Now," his captor said in a voice like honey over gravel. "You will tell me everything I want to know."

* * *

Shorner stepped away from the glass board where he, David North and Connor Blackwood had watched in tension-laden silence as the red dots signalling Crevan's team were steadily picked off. He was shaking, dear God, he was shaking. It was one thing to read someone else's report; it was another to see it first hand.

And then the last blinking red dot faded and the glowing layout of Harry Potter's neighbourhood went blank.

"FUCK!"

Connor's coffee cup went sailing across the room and smashed into the wall, leaving a stark, puke-coloured splatter on the white paint. The door slammed behind him hard enough that it bounced open again. Shorner watched the swath of destruction Connor left in his wake with a particularly spicy cocktail of hysteria, nausea, and dread.

North tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as he shuffled out the door, head down, shoulders hunched. He fairly sure that North was headed out to smoke his way through the entire pack of cigarettes he mistakenly thought Shorner didn't know about. Shorner thought for a moment about joining him. Now would be a great time for an addiction.

He gathered up Potter's files, the reports from Brazil, his personal notes and a few other things before giving into the inevitable. Shorner closed the door and threaded his way through the overturned desks and disgruntled employees of the bullpen to his office. He went to push the door all the way open before he stopped.

Wait, hadn't he locked and warded his door? Yes, he thought, his mental voice drawing the word out to its full perplexity.

Then why was it ajar?

Shorner cautiously pushed the door open with his fingertips before stepping inside. Everything looked to be in its proper order, desk buried under stacks of papers, bookshelves overflowing. Shorner grimaced and kicked the door shut behind him; he seriously needed to stop working 72-hour days. Sleep depravation, wakefulness charms and high amounts of caffeine could not be good for his system. Shifting the pile in his arms, he stepped behind his desk and resumed the never-ending paper-shuffle-tango.

Movement by the door hinges caught his eye.

He lounged idly against the wall on his left side, hands in his pockets, feet crossed at the ankles, half-hidden by the conjoining shadows of the bookshelf and doorframe. He had hair like a crow's feather and skin the colour of cream, crisscrossed here and there with tattoos and slivering scars, some newer than others. His build was lean and strong, not too tall and not too short. Eyes, green as a cat's, stared at Shorner, their expression one of languid amusement.

"Good evening Mr. Shorner. I would say it's a pleasure to meet you, but," the shadowed figure laughed low and amused, his voice an unusually rich baritone. "You've made it pretty clear you're not my number one fan."

Shorner dropped the files he was holding. "Harry Potter."

The smile was slow and knowing, an expression far too old for his supposed age. Potter shifted and sauntered towards Shorner's desk in a rolling, fluid motion. "Yes, that is my name. Though I don't think I'm too fond of it lately – seems to be getting me into trouble."

"I… can't imagine why," Shorner replied, stunned at the normality of the conversation. There was a little voice inside his head shrieking hysterically that the monster under his bed was real and it was standing at his desk with a placid, Dumbledorian smile on his face. Shorner tossed a heavy mental book onto top of the voice and squashed it until it stopped screaming. "How did you…?" he said, motioning towards the door.

"I learned how to pick locks from a stage magician."

Shorner couldn't stop the incredulous expression from spreading across his face. "Oh really?"

"I can also escape handcuffs, remove straightjackets and that reminds me," he said as a very familiar blue velvet money pouch appeared in his hands. Potter tossed it onto the desk. "You should keep a better eye on your pockets."

"Well aren't you a regular criminal?" he bit out, sharper than he intended as he stuffed the pouch back into his robes.

A wide, devil-may-care grin stretched across Potter's lips. "I do try."

The black-clad figure dropped into the chair in front of his desk, limbs sprawled across the armrests, completely possessing the space around him. He reminded Shorner of the great cats his grandfather used to hunt; of stories told to him as a young child of these magnificent creatures lazily sunning themselves on tree limbs and Sahara plains, animals that could so easily turn into the deadliest hunters of the world.

"Relax, Archie. You're tenser than a virgin on her wedding night."

Archimedes Darrin Shorner ground his teeth together and wrested his temper back under control. "It's 'Shorner', Mr. Potter. Only my mother is allowed to call me Archie and God rest her soul – she's been dead for six years."

Potter raised an eyebrow, implying with leisurely delight that he had all the time in the world and every inclination to spend it stringing Shorner up by his nerve endings. "Fair enough."

The boy wasn't really a boy. Shorner couldn't put a definite age on Potter just by looks alone. The voice and inflection was that of a man, but his build was still too slender to be any older than eighteen or nineteen. The eyes were hard, wintry and they could stare down a man thrice his age and size. His movements were economical and efficient, no extravagant gestures and no overly dramatic statements like most adolescents were prone to. And his intelligence was staggering, a creative genius of magic and violence. It was an unsettling combination.

The true feeling of fear was not high and panicky.

It was cold and sinking.

Shorner hated his reaction to Potter's presence. "Why are you here?" he snapped.

"How convenient of you to forget that _you just sent your guard dogs after me!_" Potter growled in return.

"Well maybe if you hadn't gone gallivanting around killing things we wouldn't be here!"

The warm laughter surprised him. "Ah, Shorner, you never did lose that hair-trigger temper. Probably what kept us all alive."

Something like shock rose within Shorner and pulled tight on his throat. "What? Wait…_what_?"

Potter straightened in his chair, each boot making a heavy thump as it hit the floor. "I'll be frank with you because I know you respect that," he said, eyes fixed on Shorner's own as he leaned over the desk. "This isn't the first time we've met. In fact, I've known you for close to eleven years now."

The words shook him to his core and Shorner dropped back into his chair. "You… you're not Harry Potter?"

The dark-clad man let out a soft huff of amusement. "Would that I could change my identity so easily. But before we go any further, I think you should know a few things." Green eyes bore into Shorner's own. "My name is Harry James Potter and I am twenty-seven-years-old. I was born on July thirty-first in 1980. I died on January the 9th of 2008. Not quite sure of the logistics behind it, but that doesn't change the fact I'm almost thirty in a thirteen-year-old body. I feel like a goddamn paedophile in my own skin."

Shorner's mouth went dry. "You're mad," he breathed, eyeballing the door as if he actually had a chance of making it out of here.

Potter grinned, too many teeth in the smile to be friendly. "Feel like sticking around for a little story?"

* * *

"To make a long story short, Voldemort resurrected himself when I was fourteen using a bastardized version of a necromantic restoration ritual. A year after that when the Ministry finally acknowledged his existence, he went on a rampage that made life very difficult for the wizarding world here in the U.K. Needless to say, a lot of people were killed, both wizard and Muggle. By the time I was sixteen, I had already started to off any Death Eater I encountered. I knew then, that was the only way to deal with them. Hell, they were like fucking roaches. Squish one and four more pop up in its place. Oh, and remember the one that was dead? Yeah, well, it turns out Voldemort had La Muerte bring their dead back as simple cannon fodder zombies. They also resurrected _our_ dead to make up the difference when they didn't have enough of their own Inferi. Which was a pretty effective move on their part – it's hard to face a loved one and have to kill them again, to have to look at the soulless meat puppet they've become – it's a real psychological fuck-over. But that's a little later in the story."

The man paused to sip at the coffee Shorner had placed before him, figuring the he had better appease the crazy.

"We first met when I was seventeen and I was going into the Special Forces program. You were the newly inducted head of Mission Operatives – a big change from Experimental Magics, I know, but with Blackwood drooling into a bedpan at St. Mungo's and Crevan's defection, you were the only one expendable enough for the position. Lucky you. It was a good thing too; most everyone who survived the Collapse owed their lives to you.

"A lot of shitty politics and fighting later, Scrimgeour, the douche that got elected after Fudge's resignation in '96, made the stupidest move of his admittedly short political career. In fearing an uprising from the Muggleborn population, he decided to segregate them. Now, the chances of the Muggleborns revolting for whatever reasons dwelt inside his head were slim to none. Any intelligent person could see that then wasn't the time for a revolution – especially one like what Scrimgeour feared.

"Dumbledore fought against the measure with every bit of his political and magical clout. But when Scrimgeour got paranoid, he got stupid. He declared a state of emergency and under some bullshit laws he had pushed through the Wizengamot, his word became absolute. And so, at nineteen-years-old I lost my best friend to the Muggleborn concentration camps. I never found out what happened to her. My last memory of her is of Ron and I fighting through the Auror blockades to try and reach her hands as the trains pull out.

"A couple weeks after that incident, Scrimgeour died. Official cause of death was drowning. Nobody was too interested in investigating any further and Amelia Bones took over as acting Minister."

Shorner didn't bother to hide his scepticism. "And unofficially?"

Harry bared his teeth. "He drowned sitting upright in his office chair. I watched as he choked on his last few minutes of life."

Shorner blanched.

"Not even four months later, the Muggle and Magical Ministries fall to total pieces. We never could figure out just who was responsible for that. It could have been the Japs, it could have been the French; things at that time were so fucked up I was surprised we could find our own asshole with both hands and a goddamned Lite-Bright. Azkaban fell into enemy hands, not that it really mattered by then, everybody who was a danger had broken out when I was fifteen.

"And then some crazy Death Eater yahoo snuck into Hogwarts and blew a fist-sized hole through Dumbledore's chest in the middle of the Great Hall during lunchtime before blowing his own head off. It wasn't the first time we'd encountered a kamikaze Death Eater, it just so happened that this one was more effective than the others. Didn't help matters that Voldemort was standing outside with a literal army of Death Eaters, dark creatures, dead creatures – you name it – it was there. The size of it, I can't even begin to describe. I got as many people out of there as I could, but I was the only one on location. Of the seven hundred plus people in there, only thirty got out alive. I was twenty years old at the time."

Shorner's expression was one of slack-jawed horror. _"Dear God!"_

"Oh He definitely wasn't listening by then. He'd already packed His Holy bags and left," Harry said, draining the last of his coffee. "When we finish this conversation, I am going to find the nearest pub and drink until I can't remember my own name.

"To make matters worse, Voldemort and La Croix – a man you may know of as Nicodemus Malfey, the head honcho of the French Malfeys – decided that most of North-western Europe was up for grabs. The Netherlands, France and Belgium all became Death Eater stomping ground. In a move wildly doomed to failure, my other best friend led most of the Aurors into a battle he would not survive with the intention of liberating those countries from evil. He was young and stupid and heroic and I killed a lot of Riddle's men for that.

"I wasn't there for Ron's fall. If I had, he would have never of done something that monumentally stupid. I was in Japan, completing my last assignment from you, which was finishing off the last of the wizarding version of the Yakuza – I never did bother to learn their name. Fun stuff. I left under the mistaken impression that we had it in hand. Apparently that didn't include keeping Ron from running off and leading a bunch of people to their death.

"After that fiasco, we went underground, literally. We ended up hiding out in an old WWII bunker with the rest of the Muggle refugees and what was left of wizarding Britain. There were less than three-hundred people left. I don't know how it happened, but Amelia, you, and I ended being the leaders of our little rag-tag group. I don't know what happened to the rest of the world after that; the ICW put up a blockade around the country – nothing went in and nothing went out. Supposedly it was to contain the problem, but Voldemort managed to escape anyway.

"Britain was one big fucking ghost town. You have no idea what its like. To stand in downtown London and be the only one around, its…" Harry trailed off with a cheerless smile and the beginnings of wildness in his eyes. "The wind, because there's no traffic, no cars, no _people_ to fill the spaces in between, the wind, it _howls_. It wails your ears, screaming that the world is empty and soon you'll be gone as well. Go, go, go, back to the dust of the earth," Harry sing-songed, laughing long and loud.

It was a dry sound, harsh in Shorner's ears and harsh in his mind as well.

"You're surrounded by the leftovers of humanity and you're the only one around for as far as the eye can see," Harry muttered. "It's the most alone anyone could be and I hope you never experience it."

He realized then, that that the isolation of a post-apocalyptic city was but the other side of the same coin of Azkaban's grey monotony.

The whiskey-laced cup of coffee had long gone cold under Shorner's hands. Silence stretched across Shorner's office; the sheer amount of tension in the room made his skin itch and caused his stomach to roll about uncomfortably. He contemplated how long it would take him to reach the rubbish bin before he revisited his breakfast. Shorner clenched his jaw against the sensation.

Harry's eyes were dark and unfocused, lost in whatever horrific memory that was replaying itself in his mind. There was a list of names tattooed onto the skin of his forearm where it was bared by the rolled up sleeves of his shirt. Shorner's own was on there, just above two he didn't recognize.

This, more than anything else, struck a blow against his disbelief. There were too many things that didn't add up – Harry's skills and knowledge of the DoM being chief among them. No thirteen-year-old he knew of could do these things. And Shorner would bet serious money that if the man across from him cast a spell, it would ping the trace alarms for Harry Potter.

Not a boy, not an impostor – time-travel was sounding less and less like craziness and more like a possibility. He himself was the Head of Experimental Magic and the things they could do right now seemed fantastical. Ten years from now and in dire conditions? Shorner doubted that they would stop with small jumps in time-travel. They'd give anything, _anything_ to reverse the Hell that Harry spoke of.

Shorner shifted in his chair and watched as Harry's posture changed abruptly from relaxed introspection to ready-to-kill in less time than it took to blink.

Dear _God_.

In front of him sat a ticking time bomb ready to unleash violence upon the world at the slightest provocation. This person was teetering on the knife-edge of sanity with a kill record probably numbering in the _thousands_ and did Shorner want to give free rein to this bloke?

Not. Bloody. Likely.

He laced his hands together and rested his mouth against them. Harry steadily met his gaze, all traces of potential violence tucked away. "I'm worried about you."

He raised a hand in answer to Harry's confused look. "I'm not ignoring what you've told me. And I know there are things you haven't told me for reasons that are too personal to share. I'm just concerned for you. How are you dealing with this? Actually _dealing_ with what you've been through."

Harry turned away from Shorner, black hair gleaming blue under the office light, face wiped completely clean of any expression. Shorner watched the man study the wall for several long moments.

"Archie, I've been back for less than a _week_," he said, voice turned sharp and gravelled with bitterness. "I wake up and I think I'm still lying in my cell, the generators throbbing in my ears and the only thing I know is pain and hatred and darkness. I thought of death as a mercy." His voice slipped down an octave as it descended into a savage rasp. Harry glanced over at him, green eyes glittering like pale absinthe in Shorner's crappy office lighting. "Spare me the therapy routine. I haven't even been back long enough to know if I will go off the deep end or not."

Shorner shuddered at the level of viciousness his voice carried. Dark veela, _Morrigans_, were noted to have exceptionally exquisite voices, capable of enticing the listener with everything from lust and insidious beauty to the raw, poisonous hatred Harry expressed. It was as awesome as it was terrifying to hear. Harry had obviously inherited his grandmother's talents in spades.

"I'm sorry," Harry mumbled, hunched over with his face hidden in his hands. "I didn't mean to snap. I haven't slept for couple days and my temper is short."

"I hate to dissapoint you, but I'm not going to start crying just because you got a little snippy," Shorner replied bluntly, beginning to like the bloke much against his own will. "What do you plan on doing next?" As if it was possible to make some sense out this.

"Honestly? I don't know. I really don't know." Harry straightened in his chair, pushing a stray lock of dark hair out of his face. "I have all these vague plans and ideas floating around in my head and the only thing I know for certain is I'm headed back to Hogwarts on the first."

Shorner frowned. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"What, Hogwarts? Why not?"

"Because you're twenty-eight years old and Hogwarts is moot point. Quite frankly, you are probably suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and I don't want to put you around people you could hurt." _And I know hurting them would hurt you, possibly even drive you over the edge._

"I'm not going to hurt them!" Harry snarled indignantly.

"How do you know that? You've been conditioned to violently respond to outside stimuli, which is not a good combination with children who are prone to doing strange and stupid things. You are a highly skilled, highly stressed special op who could probably use a vacation more than anything else."

Green eyes narrowed, anger beginning to spark across Harry's face. "Did you listen to nothing I said? _I can't afford to take a vacation._"

"You can't afford to hurt somebody else's child either," Shorner growled back, aggravated that Harry was so wilfully blind to the obvious problems of his situation.

Harry stood and paced around Shorner's too small office. He finally stopped, head bowed, knuckles white on the back of the chair. "I just don't want to tip my hand too soon. And if you think for a second that I'll be able to slip away without notice, I'll bet you diamonds to Galleons that Albus Dumbledore and Cornelius Fudge will be knocking down doors the moment Harry Potter doesn't show up at King's Cross on September the first."

Shorner uncrossed his arms and leant forward, bracing his elbows on the desk. "Look, why don't you compose a report of all the Death Eaters you know of and bring it to me in a week. By then, I'll have sorted through all you've told me and you'll have had a week off to regain a little sanity. Sometimes, you need to step back from a situation in order to properly deal with it. Go have a drink or climb a mountain or whatever has your interest. Just, relax and get some rest. Because right now, I'm leery of being in this office with you and I'm fairly certain you're not going to attack me."

A wry grin worked its way onto Harry's face. "Point taken. You aren't going to tell anyone about this?"

"Hah! Who would believe me? Especially after the amount of damage control I have to do in order to cover your arse not to mention my own. Did you really have to kill Crevan's entire team?"

"You know what kind of men Mission Operatives likes to employ – especially for the Special Forces Unit. Kill a few and the rest think it's a free for all."

Shorner's intercom system crackled to life, causing both of them to jump, a wand appearing in Harry's hand where there had been nothing before. "Shorner! Crevan's in the infirmary babbling about flying cars – his left arm is half-way ripped off! Get your arse down here, now!" Connor's dulcet tones rang out from the aging Muggle speaker system.

Shorner looked at Harry in disbelief. "You left one alive!"

"Yes, I dropped him off in your medical facilities," Harry replied with a half-smile that didn't quite thaw out the chill menace lingering in his expression. "He'll be fine. Or at least he should be, once Blackwood's done with him."

"Just," Shorner waved a hand in Harry's direction; certain that he was an instance away from flailing about like a loon. "Get out of here. Go. I've got to clean up the mess you've made and I don't want to see you for a week."

Harry finally let loose a real smile and ambled out of Shorner's office. "Good to have you back, Archie," he said as the door closed behind him.

Shorner waited for the door to snick shut before giving into the rising panic within him.


	10. The Interpretation Thereof

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Nine

The Interpretation Thereof

Sirius sat hunched over in the darkest corner in the room. It was easier than he thought to avoid the other patrons of the Painted Rose; in fact, the noisy pub seemed to cater almost exclusively to rough and suspicious looking clientele. His skin crawled with disgust and anxiety.

Why here? Why here of all places, smack dab in the middle of Knockturn Alley? Sirius remembered the raids the Aurors had conducted through here, looking for the elusive black markets of magical London. All they had found were rumours, dark magic and death.

He wondered for a moment just _how_ Harry knew about a place like this – the Painted Rose certainly wasn't something gossiped about in the Gryffindor dorms for cheap thrills like firewhiskey. Not like the Hog's Head at any rate.

But then again… Harry hadn't exactly seemed like a typical student. No thirteen-year-old he knew of could kill like that – not even Bellatrix and she had been a right hellion at that age. Sirius could readily attest to that.

Harry made him uneasy and it wasn't just the sheer level of dark magic that wafted off of his person. It was the mannerisms, the way of speaking, the absolute control, absolute _knowledge_ he held of himself. Not a limb moved without him knowing exactly where it coincided with his other limbs and how that movement should relate to the rest of his body; it was a level of bodily awareness and economy of motion that didn't happen without years of training. There wasn't much wasted in how Harry responded to his physical surroundings, talking with his body, saying just how powerful and skilled he was with the slip-slide of skin over muscle. He reminded Sirius of the ex-Unspeakable who taught hand-to-hand combat to all new Aurors-in-training.

And from what he'd gathered, the wizarding world had been in a relative state of peace for the last twelve years.

Why then, why did Harry know these things? How to fight? How to _kill_? How had he known about him and his animagus form? Harry had recognized him. _Recognized_ him. His eyes had lit up in complete knowledge that the scabby, dirty dog in the bushes was his long-estranged godfather.

Which beget the question – _just who was Harry?_

The door of the Painted Rose opened and a dark-clad figure of medium height sauntered over to the bar. He leaned against it, speaking to the bartender in close, murmured tones and a wide, impish grin.

The pretty young women smiled and replied back with some witty remark, leaning over to display the full amount of cleavage possible. The figure tossed his head back and laughed and Sirius belatedly recognized his godson.

Harry picked up two brimming tankards and wove his way through the crowd to Sirius' corner table.

"Couldn't have picked a darker, danker corner than this?" Harry said with a grin, depositing one of the tankards in front of him, amber liquid sloshing over the sides.

He raised an eyebrow at his godson's nonchalant disregard. "I don't know where you've been for the past week, but I am one of the most wanted men in all of Britain," he replied in a low voice.

Harry leaned back in his chair, regarding him with a piercing gaze. "Apparently, we've barely even met and have already started off on the wrong foot. So let's try this again." Harry shifted forward, bracing his forearms on the table, lips curling into a hard smile, tone clipped and low. "Hello, my name is Harry Potter. And you are Sirius Orion Black, my godfather, Grim animagus extraordinaire, falsely accused of being the spineless son of a bitch that betrayed my parents. When in fact, it was Peter Pettigrew who was the traitorous secretkeeper; a rat animagus whom when you confronted, proceeded to bite off his own finger, blow up the street killing twelve Muggles and leave you for the Aurors to find holding the figurative murder weapon in your hand. You recently broke out of Azkaban because you found out where Wormtail is. And now you are out to get him. If you want to prove your innocence to the ministry instead of killing off the only evidence there is, I can help you with that."

Sirius gaped. "How…?"

"That's a story in and of itself. Just know that I am here to help you and I will do everything in my power possible to make sure you clear your name. If you can wait a few more weeks, I can grab Wormtail from Hogwarts and bring him to Bones. That should be the easiest way, no mess, no fuss – I can tell her that I caught him transforming or something similar. And then I can submit a petition for a retrial and after that, your life is back into your control. Congratulations, Sirius, you are that much closer to being a free man."

He stared at his godson in disbelief. "Who are you?"

Harry tilted his head forward and swirled the lager in his mug thoughtfully. "You know, I've asked myself that on more than one occasion. I've gotten a different answer each time."

"Oh, right," Sirius said, confusion beginning to take over the shock. "Who's Bones?"

His godson gave him an assessing glance and his features seemed to soften. "Amelia Bones is the Director of Magical Law Enforcement and in the best position to help us. She's a fair, well-balanced person and I would trust her with my life."

"And your plan, it could work?" He didn't want to hope. It killed faster than apathy.

"Yes, if you could lay low for just a little while, I can get the lion's share of this done and you'll be free before you know it." A pleading note entered his voice. "Let me help you, Sirius. Let me do this for you. It's all I ask."

Sirius licked his lips, searching for the words to express himself. "Alright," he said, unaware of the smile beginning to work its way across his face. "Alright. How can I say no to that?"

Harry smiled back. "You have no idea how relieving that is to hear you say that."

Sirius glanced down at the ragged picture of a shy, scruffy, glasses-clad eleven-year-old ripped from an old Daily Prophet. He carefully folded it and tucked it back away in his pocket.

Harry tilted his head, curiosity written on his features, light hitting the pale scars on his face. "What? What is it?"

Sirius snorted to himself. "Nothing. You're not what I expected, not even a little bit."

"What? You expected a James Potter mini-me to be running around?" his godson replied with a wry smile. "I hate to disillusion you, but I never knew either of my parents. I'm not them. Never have been, never will be."

"So I'm coming to understand," replied Sirius and he paused. "I have seen your father kill in a battle once. And he was never quite the same after that. But you," Sirius glanced back at Harry. "I saw you, Harry. I watched the whole thing. That wasn't the first time you've killed, was it?"

"No, it isn't." Harry said in simple agreement offering no more on the subject. Sirius filed that away into the steadily expanding folder titled 'Things I Don't Know About Harry and I'm Not Sure I Want To'.

"I find it sad that you never had the opportunity to know Lily and James. They were good people, would have been good parents too, had they gotten the chance," Sirius smiled wistfully into his tankard. "God, I miss them. You have no idea what its like to have your life change in a single moment, to lose everything you knew…" he shook his head.

"Oh, I might surprise you."

The words held an unexpected weight, one of bitterness and exhaustion. Sirius shook his head in disbelief. "What do you mean?"

Harry's expression tightened and Sirius felt an unexpected prickle of fear along his spine as the sharp scent of dark magic deepened, drowning out the smells of the pub. Sirius had a momentary flashback to his youth, the ozone-flavoured tang of dark halls and disapproving relatives. Dark wizards, all of them, and the intolerable sin he had committed by befriending the Muggle boy from next door. They'd locked Sirius attic for a week and when they let him out, he had to wear the Muggle boy's skin in penance. They'd flayed the Muggle boy alive. Sirius remembered the way the dead flesh felt against his own, cold, coagulating blood smeared onto his robes as Bellatrix and Narcissa laughed at his punishment.

'_No. Don't. Don't think about it.'_

Sirius wanted to cry. His godson, the precious child James had entrusted to him, had become one of _them_. A dark wizard.

_Why?_ He ached with the question, a sense of despair beginning to fill him. _Why would he do such a thing?_

"Sirius? Are you alright?" Concern flittered across Harry's face. "You seem troubled."

It was a trap. It had to be a trap, why else was he being nice? Sirius gripped the edge of the table, knuckles white against the water stained wood. '_Stop it! This isn't a trap, this is Harry. Remember Harry?'_

No, he didn't.

He didn't know this cold, hard killer, this boy-man with the vicious smile and whiskey-velvet voice.

'_Lily and James would have drowned him at birth if they knew what he'd become. Oh Sirius, you poor, stupid animal. Look at what you've gotten yourself into.'_ The brutal return of the Voice surprised him. How could it say that? How could it even…

'_No, you know I'm right. You saw what __**He**__ did. How he __**slaughtered**__ all those men. You didn't even bother to stop him, the only thing you did was sit there with your tongue lolling out like the fool mutt you are.'_

"Yoo-hoo! Hello? Is there any sign of life in there?" A hand was waving in front of his face.

Sirius tried to bite it.

The hand turned around and slapped him upside the face. He came back to himself, cheek stinging, feeling like a bucket of ice water had been tipped over his head.

"You back with me, yet?" Harry asked, his voice tinged with irritation, worry and something like anger. "Because you _growled_ at me like a goddamn animal."

Sirius touched the side of his face in astonishment. "I… I didn't know," he swallowed, throat dry and tight. He guzzled the rest of his tankard, something fuzzy settling in the corners of his mind.

His godson buried his face in his hands. "Oh God," he muttered, voice muffled by his hands. "You're crazy. You're fucking _crazy_. You're a certifiable nut-job that probably shouldn't be around children let alone other people. How the hell could I have missed this? No wonder Mrs. Weasley didn't want me around you. Fuck me running."

Sirius scowled at Harry. "I think I'm doing damn well for myself considering all things. At least I don't kill people for fun. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," he said sharply, not bothering to hide the disgust in his voice.

"Well," Harry said derisively. "It seems that I have a previously unknown talent of being able to antagonize the fuck out of people just by breathing. Oh, wait! I already knew that. I just didn't think that it applied to the people that I care about. How stupid of myself."

"How can say 'care'? Are you going to kill me if I don't comply with what you want me to do?" Sirius muttered.

"I'm not going to kill you! What is it with everyone and thinking I'm going to attack them?" His godson's expression was caught somewhere between hurt and rage, before it was wiped clean.

Sirius leaned forward, his wrath getting the better of him and slammed his hands against the table.

The pub quieted, eyes turning towards their direction. "Subtle," Harry growled, a sneer audible in his voice.

Sirius sank back into his shadowy corner, the fear of being discovered overriding his anger.

When no sign of a fight came, the patrons of the Painted Rose turned their interests back to other things. In an ironic twist, Sirius felt intensely grateful for the pub's rough-edged patrons who probably wouldn't even bat an eyelash at a violent confrontation. His lip curled and he laughed softly to himself.

He gazed at his godson, realizing the stark difference between him and James. Harry was, for all purposes, a virtual stranger. Who apparently knew more about Sirius then he did about Harry.

An uncomfortable silence stretched across the table, seemingly severe against the rambunctious patrons of the Painted Rose. Harry met his stare and held it. Those eyes were not those of a child. He felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that he was probably the cause of it. Maybe if he hadn't gone after Peter, maybe if he hadn't given Harry to Hagrid, maybe if he had stopped to think about what he was doing, maybe, maybe, _maybe_. He tried not to think about it. There was too much there that just plain _hurt_.

"Awkward." Harry sing-songed, eyes flicking away.

Sirius closed his eyes and pressed his thumbs to the bridge of his nose. "This really isn't how I imagined meeting you."

"Neither did I," Harry replied, voice tinged with amusement. "I hadn't counted on the fact you'd be absolutely disgusted by my presence."

He stared at Harry with shock, the need to deny his statement rising up in him. His godson didn't even blink, a self-depreciating smile on his face. "Don't deny it," he said. "I can tell if you're lying to me and trying to say otherwise would just make me feel more like shit."

Sirius struggled for words, knowing in his gut he couldn't truthfully deny it.

Harry's expression went terrifyingly blank.

"It's not that, it's… Just, why here? We're in the middle of Knockturn Alley, Harry. Why here?" he said, silently begging Harry not to get angry.

"Because I had Special Forces on my tail and it was the only thing I could pull out of my ass at a moment's notice," Harry replied, voice dropping in tone and cadence, his smooth, lightly gravelled baritone becoming a stone-throated rasp. It was an uncanny sound and Sirius shuddered, skin crawling. James had been a tenor and Lily, a musical alto. Where this sound, this mutter of a feral cat's came from, he did not know.

Harry's head bowed, hands clutching his hair in white-knuckled claws. "Look, stay low for a little while, okay? I've got a few things to clear up before I can go after Pettigrew. I'll contact you when everything's in order."

His head spun with the abrupt turnabout in the conversation. "Where…? How…?"

"Don't worry about me. I'll find you." With those words Harry stood and disappeared out the door.

What the hell?

Sirius began wonder just _what_ he had gotten himself into.

* * *

Diagon Alley proper was packed full and it was raining to boot. He drifted through the crowd, feeling detached from the world around him. Being around this many people, this many _happy_, normal people – it was like walking through a dream, everything overly bright and opium hazed – far too fucking good to be the real world. The real world had teeth; it wasn't a candy-coated land of shits and rainbows.

Fuck. Now he had Puff the Magic Dragon stuck in his head.

Harry knew he'd been an asshole to Sirius. But he'd had to get out of there; his skin was starting to feel too tight and he was afraid that if he stayed there any longer, he might start bawling his eyes out or something equally stupid.

It was a bitter irony that the very reason why he started actively fighting the war was the one he could no longer get along with. He wasn't thirteen anymore. He wasn't some desperate, stupid child who only wanted a family that loved him and would take care of him. He'd given up on that dream a long time back.

Harry chuckled softly.

He knew what the problem was.

It was himself. He was still looking at Sirius with the memories of a child and those memories did not mesh with what he saw with the eyes of a man. Sirius was a broken, beaten wreck. Inside his own head, he was still twenty-one years old. Twelve years in Azkaban did not broaden one's mind or reasoning skills or any number of things. Hell, Sirius had looked at him with _fear_.

And that hurt. Sirius, a man he remembered as trying to save him, was now afraid of him. It was like a knife to the chest and he intimately familiar how that felt.

Damn it. Damn it all to hell.

A flash of white-blonde hair caught his eye.

The senior Malfoy strolled imperiously past the teeming crowd, seemingly too powerful, too upper fucking class to even acknowledge those around him. Bastard.

'_One curse,'_ Harry thought. '_One curse and he'd be dead before he hit the ground.'_

It was tempting – too tempting and his magic rose with a clamour under his skin. _Rip the flesh from his bone!_ it sang, _And cram it down his throat until he chokes on it!_

'_Hush,'_ he told himself, soothing the sudden violent hunger throbbing through his blood. Harry glanced back at Malfoy to find the man staring directly back at him, pale, cold eyes uneasy.

Harry bared his teeth in a caricature of a smile. _'Felt that did you? Careful Lucius, I can smell fear.'_

The crowd surged forward and Harry lost himself in it, using a series of Portkeys to cover his trail back to Number 4. He appeared soundlessly, right where he'd left four hours before.

Smoke curled up in a lazy trail, marking the sky with a giant 'You Are Here' sign.

"Oh Fuck," Harry muttered to himself, the adrenaline rush from his magic beginning to fade.

The neighbourhood was just as wet as London, but that didn't detour people from crowding up close to the still smouldering wreckage in front of Number 12. Police tape lined the scene and eight black body bags lay in a row waiting to be loaded into the coroner's vehicle. Petunia stood next to the catty bint from Number 6, both resplendent in their dressing gowns and hair curlers. In fact, most of the crowd were still in their pyjamas.

Harry glanced up at the grey-lit sky, the smoky haze just now beginning to dissipate. Was it really that early? Yes, yes it was. Exhaustion was starting to creep into his bones. He turned around, intending to head back to Number 4 when Petunia's shrill voice rang out.

"You!" she shrieked, finding some untapped well of courage to publicly confront him. "What the bloody hell did you do?"

A sudden hush ran through the crowd as every head turned to stare at the commotion.

Harry blinked docilely at Petunia, lack of sleep catching up to him. "I beg your pardon?"

"This!" she said, flinging a bony arm out at burning remains of the Isuzu and the bodies lying in a row, encased in their giant black Ziploc baggies. "You did this! I know you did. Dudley saw you! Murderer!"

Harry crossed his arms and braced his feet wide, shoulder length apart, keeping a wary eye on the by-now, very interested police. Double fuck.

He looked back to Petunia. He knew what she was doing. This was retaliation for the incidents in the kitchen and him running her out of the house before that. "Dudley saw me?" Harry replied, cynicism liberally lacing his tone. "And you believe him?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Yes I do," she hissed. "I knew I should have left you at the orphanage. You are nothing more than a useless, _sadistic_ waste of space. I always knew you'd go bad"

The bobbies were beginning to walk towards them, two on his right and three on his left. Harry reached forward and seized Petunia's wrist, pulling her towards him. "Listen to me, you stupid cunt," he snarled in her ear, hands tightening on her arm as she whimpered. "You are going to keep your mouth shut and I am going to get my things and leave. And, maybe, just maybe I might do this without killing you or your miserable dolt of a husband."

He released her and stepped back. "Number 4, Privet Drive of Little Whinging, Surrey was never and will never be my home. You made sure of that. Now you must lie in the bed you've made for yourself."

Harry turned and began a steady jog back to Number 4, ignoring the shouts of the police behind him.

* * *

Six days later, Harry strolled back into the DoM, much the same as he had a week ago. No wonder the Death Eaters had so easily broken in; the security here was an absolute joke. Harry stepped off the lift and wove past the busy employees to Shorner's office.

The door swung open and Shorner visibly started in shock at the sight of Harry, scattering papers and broken quills. "Damn it, Harry! Don't you know how to knock?" he said, irritation lacing his tone as he mopped up the spilt ink with the edge of his robes.

Harry smothered a sheepish grin. "Sorry, I thought you knew I was going to be here today."

Shorner scowled. "I didn't mean you were supposed to sneak up on me."

"Oops," Harry replied without repentance. He dropped down into the chair in front of Shorner's desk, tossing a bound stack of paper onto the desk. "Happy much belated birthday. I know you didn't ask for Death Eaters, but I couldn't reserve strippers on this short of a notice. Though I think you could probably convince your secretary to do that for you."

The older man looked up from where he'd been removing the spilt ink with his wand, black liquid rising into the air like an inky cumulonimbus. "I don't have a secretary."

"No, not the cute little brunette? Oh, about this tall?" Harry said, indicating the woman's height with a raised hand.

"You mean Maggie?" Shorner replied as he vanished the ink and reached for Harry's report.

"And I'm the one who had to wear glasses for the first fifteen years of my life. You might want to take the chance the first time it's offered; the sweet types like her don't stick around for very long. She's likely to be gone before you know it."

Shorner glanced up and glowered good-naturedly at him. "I wonder about the irony of _you_ talking about my sex-life. Found anyone who will shag a thirteen-year-old boy?"

"Ouch. Now that was below the belt. I'll have you know that I had a wonderful vacation. A little sand, a little sun, a little bit of ocean. There are some magnificent beaches in Brazil," Harry replied. "It was nice to see something there other than crazy necromancers and soggy jungle. You know, for the longest time, I thought that was all there was to Brazil."

"And the half-naked women have nothing to do with it."

Harry smiled. "Now who's the one making assumptions?"

Shorner scoffed at his words, but the amused gleam in his eyes gave him away. "Right. I'm just glad you've mostly stayed out of trouble. Although your little stunt in Surrey gave me some problems. Don't be surprised if you get hauled in for questioning the next time you're in the Muggle world. By the time I was able to get through all the damned red tape, the incident had already spread too far for us to wipe clean."

Harry's quick reflexes saved a tall stack of papers from tumbling into his lap as Shorner shuffled through the clutter atop his desk. "And?"

"We did manage to clear out any evidence you might have been the one that killed them, like fingerprints and whatnot." Shorner replied, shaking his head as he dug through a thick manila envelope. "The 'official' story is that a gang trafficking drugs holed up there and a private militia tried to remove them to varying degrees of success. Not my best work, but it was what I could come up with at the time."

Harry snorted. "Drug-running. Good one, Archie, but don't quit your day job."

"Oh, believe me, it gets even better," Shorner said, tossing a pair of circular steel discs onto the desk.

Harry reached out and picked them up; dangling from the end of a shot-bead chain was his name, blood type, age, and designation detailed in sharp-cut runes. They were much different than Muggle dogtags, being of magical origin, but still very similar.

_Sharr, Hadrian, J. _

_AB-_

_28_

_SF_

Holy shit. These were his tags, his military tags. The information was obviously very different from the first time they were issued to him, but still… "Twenty-eight?" Harry asked, peering at the number.

"Technically, you've had a birthday. Twenty-eight is quite a ways away from thirteen, but for what it's worth, Happy Birthday." A dry smile flickered across Shorner's face. "Sorry I couldn't get you strippers on this short a notice."

Harry let out a soft huff of amusement. "What was it that you had in mind?"

The older man pursed his lips and uncrossed his arms. "I'm making you one of us. Officially, you enlisted under your real name, Hadrian Sharr, in 1982 and served in the Special Forces Unit for the past eleven years."

"I've got to ask," Harry asked, realizing what was bugging him about the tags in his hand. "Where are you getting Hadrian Sharr from?"

"Your mother's birth name was Lily Aideen Sharr. Her original file listed you, her son, as Hadrian Sharr," said Shorner.

Harry blinked. "My name is Harry Potter."

"And apparently its also Hadrian Sharr," replied Shorner without missing a beat.

Something small and rabid deep in his brain chanted _Mine, mine, mine, my name, you can't have it, you can't take it away from me, I own the clothes on my back and my name, my name, my name._

"Why?" he asked, pushing aside the moment of weirdness.

Shorner shook his head. "I don't know. I'm only working with what I've got."

"Who makes up those files?" Harry only knew the names on a pair of tombstones; finding out that his mother had led a life so wholly different from what he'd imagined was a bit like taking a brick to the face and trying to see straight afterward.

"I'm sorry?" replied Shorner, raising an eyebrow.

A surge of irritation ran through Harry before he could wrestle his temper back under control. "The file you got that name from – who made it?"

"Usually the nurse attendant. The file then updates itself as the subject ages. It's a tricky bit of blood magic, but it works. Any more questions?"

Harry shook his head. "No – Wait. Can I get a copy of her file?"

"Which one?" Seeing Harry's confusion, Shorner amended. "Pre-adoption or post-adoption?"

"Both, if at all possible."

"I'll see what I can do." Picking up where he'd left off earlier, Shorner continued, "You, Hadrian Sharr, were born in 1965 to Artimis Sharr and Bree Verall, whose status is unknown which makes your 'birth' possible. Now we are obviously stretching your grandfather's death date a little bit and I've already gone through the records and changed it."

"You sure that's a good idea?" Harry replied dubiously. "Dead men may tell no tales, but the live ones certainly do."

"I didn't have any other options as good as this one," Shorner rejoined tiredly. "His death date isn't common knowledge, even among the DoM; most people just assume that when Dumbledore brought down he killed him and few know of Grindelwald's real name, so it shouldn't send up any immediate red flags. I thought you would appreciate the attachment to your family."

Shorner tossed Harry's well-modified folder onto the desk. "Congratulations. You are now officially Lily Aideen Sharr's younger brother and an employee of the DoM."

Harry whistled appreciatively. "Not bad, not bad at all. What are we going to do about Harry Potter? Considering that I, well _he_, doesn't really exist anymore."

"Harry Potter exists. He's just only alive on paper. So, we'll tell them the truth."

Harry raised an eyebrow at Shorner's satisfied expression. "_Pravda_ ne novosti, a novosti ne pravda?" he said, making reference to the infamous newspaper of the USSR.

Shorner made a funny clicking sound with his tongue. "Are you accusing me of lying? Seems moot point by now," he intoned in a dry voice.

Harry frowned, waving him off and Shorner took the hint to continue. "In addition to the missions we sent you on, you also assumed the persona of Harry Potter. For the last two years, you went to Hogwarts and played a part in order to lure out the last of the Death Eaters – Harry Potter becoming a name that we dangled as bait. The 'real' story being that Voldemort was taken out by yourself and your sister, Lily Sharr; at the age of fifteen, you and the late Lady Sharr combined your forces in a desperate move, one in which you were lucky enough to defeat him and one in which she did not survive in giving her life for you.

"Considering how powerful she was, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to say you two caught him off guard and managed to banish him," said Shorner as he glanced up at Harry. "And yes, I did put 'banished' in the official report."

"That's going to go over well."

Shorner stacked the papers back together and put them aside. "Not like they have a lot of choice about that. If we can prepare them for war ahead of time..."

Harry nodded. "Then who knows how many we can save."

"Yes," said Shorner. "That is what I'm hoping for."

Harry laughed. "And so, I am reduced to a fanciful bedtime story. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than a baby defeating one of the most powerful wizards of modern times," he mused. "Truth is often times stranger than fiction. How are you going to push this through?"

Shorner pinched the bridge of his nose. "The only reason why we are going to pull this one off is that every current Head of the DoM gained their positions after the fall of Voldemort. Our story is that your file was a sealed deal and you've been operating under various aliases."

"Which is true enough," Harry agreed.

Shorner tipped his head in acknowledgement. "The man who instigated the black ops program, George Pryce, died eight months ago and he was not only the one who brought you in, but also your contact for assignments. Since his death you've been carrying out his last orders, but no one has contacted you since his demise. When Black escaped, the situation changed and you had to surface. You coincided that with a bit of personal revenge.

"In one of your earlier missions, you were supposed to take out one of La Muerte's lieutenants. You succeeded, but were captured as a result of your partner's stupidity. He wanted a trophy to show as proof of his escapades – and mind you, he's just a name I dug up out of the obscure records of the Special Forces program – and was subsequently killed. You were held in captivity for seven months total, then escaped, hiding out for a further two months after that before you deemed it safe enough to come back in. After the psychological evaluations pronounced you fit, you returned to your Potter persona and to completing missions for us.

"Thus taking care of your sudden reappearance and profile."

"You never cease to amaze me," Harry said as he hung the tags around his neck.

"All that remains is for you to talk to Connor and the whole thing should fall into place," Shorner replied, gulping down the last of the muddy sludge in his coffee mug. "I've also arranged to be your contact. I'm not sure how well that will go over, but you should be able to push that through. I don't think Connor would want to argue with you."

Harry winced; Snape had made potions that looked more appetizing than the contents of Shorner's cup. "Are you sure its safe to be drinking that?"

"No, but it's caffeine," Shorner replied shortly. "Unless, of course, you'd like to get me something different?"

"I think I'll pass," Harry muttered.

"Smart choice." Shorner's expression tightened. "If there's anything else I can do for you, let me know. Don't try to do this alone. It's too much for one man, no mattered how skilled or powerful you may be. This will drive you mad if you don't let anyone in."

'_I think I was mad to begin with. Probably got dropped my head as a baby. I'm going to blame my father for that one; he seems like a likely culprit.'_ Harry pushed the stray thought away. "Been there, done that. It's not easy to open up to people on a good day. But this... If I hadn't walked away first, I'm sure he would have run off in fear. And I didn't even get say any of the really freaky shit about myself."

"Who was it?" Shorner cocked his head at Harry and settled his elbows on the table.

Harry was reminded a bit of a bird, a hunting falcon perhaps, especially with Shorner's sharp grey eyes and high cheekbones. It was strange to see such a familiar expression on so different of a face. The beard was missing as was the short, silver-streaked hair and crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. In its place was a younger, more open face, long hair, light stubble around the jaw and a mouth more prone to smiling than scowls of anger or sadness. It was hard not to stare in total disbelief.

"Sirius Black, my godfather."

Shorner's jaw flapped up and down in a very comical manner. "I'm sorry; I could have sworn I heard you say…"

"He's innocent, Archie, the wrong man accused of the wrong thing," Harry said, a smile emerging again. "He was framed by Pettigrew, who, in addition to being the secretkeeper, is also a rat animagus. He cut off his finger and escaped into the sewers leaving Sirius with the blame."

"Is there anything else you'd like to share with me?" Shorner replied incredulously, looking as if he might start to hyperventilate.

Harry was sure his amusement was written all over his face. He'd never been very good at hiding when he was happy. "Not at the moment."

A strange combination of disbelief and tiredness crossed Shorner's face. "Wonderful."

"When do you want me to talk to Blackwood?" Harry said, steering the conversation back to its original purpose.

Shorner flicked his wand and Harry's report flew across the room to hide in the bookshelves. "Sooner rather than later. Who knows what he might do since you killed his men. He might dub you an enemy of the state and put a bounty on your head for all I know."

Harry shrugged. "How about right now?" Wouldn't be the first time somebody tried off him for a price. He didn't want to have to take on the Ministry itself, but survival was more than just an instinct.

It was a necessity.


	11. La Marche des Sans Nom

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Ten

La Marche des Sans Nom

Connor Blackwood was the kind of man who wasn't above using his physical presence to intimidate people.

Being 6'5 and over fourteen stone worth of hard-earned muscle, Connor presented a handsome and imposing figure to people more used to respecting magical power than physical power. Most wizards, being both lazy and vain, were particularly susceptible to Connor's brand of intimidation and he well employed that in his surroundings. In sharp contrast to Shorner's crowded office, Connor's was spacious and attractively arranged, dominated by a large opulent desk behind which were a series of wall-to-ceiling windows. It gave the impression to the viewer that Connor was some sort of benevolent deity, fearsome in his wrath and gentle in his assurances, backlit by scenes straight from the mythical Eden of religious conviction. Shorner, being well versed in Muggle art and culture, knew that Connor had ripped the idea straight off of Da Vinci's Last Supper.

In short, Connor Blackwood was a dick. Not that this was news to anyone, but Shorner's vague thoughts of this meeting ending in a bloodbath began to feel like a sobering premonition. Or at least it might have, had the whole thing not been so damn ridiculous. Two alpha males in one room and suddenly everything was a testosterone-fuelled contest of wills. Shorner resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

Playing the insidious demon to Connor's munificent godhood, Harry stood in the middle of the room; feet braced wide, hands held behind his back, dressed in unmarked black fatigues, a slight curl to his lips which could be anything from derision to amusement. Instead of softening his features, the light threw him into harsh relief, eyes glowing a vivid optic green beneath heavy lids, lending a sinister aspect to his normally mischievous smirk.

Shorner knew the expression to be a bluff. It was his game-face, the one that said 'Do your worst'. He was coming to understand that it was an unconscious move on Harry's part, this reaction of seemingly total fearlessness towards the world.

It was also one of Harry's few tells of nervousness and anxiety. Shorner hadn't spent four years as an agent profiler for nothing.

From his corner of the room, he could sense Connor's rising discomfort and felt vaguely amused by its source. It was not that he thought Harry was de-fanged by the legalizing of his actions or by him sharing a very intimate, very _agonizing_ part of his life's history – not in the slightest. He did, however, believe Harry to be a far more rational individual than what Connor was making him out to be. He was a veteran field agent, not a half-crazed Azkaban escapee.

Harry tilted his head. Connor folded his arms. Harry shifted in place. Connor chewed the inside of his cheek. The staring contest continued.

Shorner smothered a smile at the downright comical picture the two of them made. If it walks like a cliché, talks like a cliché, then it probably was a cliché. But the notion fit; he almost expected tumbleweeds to roll across the floor, a spaghetti western tune playing in the background while Connor drawled on about 'this town not being big enough for the two of them'. He puckered his lips to whistle the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly before he caught himself.

"You are Hadrian James Sharr, 28 years old, born on November 16, 1965 to Artimis Sharr and Bree Verall?" Connor inquired, breaking the silence. A lesser man might have thought Connor had won the contest by the smug expression and the authoritative tone in his words. Shorner knew better.

Harry didn't even blink. "Yes sir," he replied.

"You don't look anywhere near thirteen or twenty-eight."

"Experimental Magics cooked up an aging potion with an extremely slow molecular breakdown. I don't know how they created it and considering what it tasted like, I'm not sure I want to. My guess is that with the added hormones as I get 'older', it fucks with its alkalinity levels, speeding the process up a notch. Makes it a bitch to keep track of my reflexes."

Connor flipped a page in Harry's file and glanced over at Shorner. "An aging potion? That's all?"

Shorner shrugged. "The simple solutions are usually the best. Less that can go wrong."

"I gather that's all I'm going to get out of you," he replied dryly, the old joke between Experimental Magics and their field counterparts popping up once more.

He quirked a smile at that. "Sorry, Connor. Against company policy."

Connor hummed deep in his throat, turning his attention back to Harry. "It says here you are also a dark magic sorcerer and as being well versed in Animation and few other esoteric arts. I found no records of you attending Hogwarts or any other establishment. In addition to your training with Special Forces, where did your education come from?" He was digging for something, but Shorner wasn't sure what he was looking for. It sparked a nervous twinge inside of him before he reminded himself that Harry's real story was far more improbable and fantastical than the tale they had spun together.

"A little here, a little there. Some of it I learned from my sister and a few of her acquaintances, but most I picked up on my own. Figured out what worked and what didn't and in those days, it wasn't very hard to find practical applications. There was always Death Eater scum lurking in the background," Harry said breezily, something dangerous glittering in his eyes as he calmly wove together truth and fiction. "Considering how many 'disappeared' and were never accounted for in the first place, I don't think you've missed them a whole lot."

Connor's jaw tightened in annoyance. "How did you kill He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?"

"I didn't."

Shorner gritted his teeth and sank into the chair at the back of the room. _'Leave it to Harry to fuck with his chances of getting away with murder.'_

* * *

"On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst, just how badly do you think that went?" Harry asked cheerfully.

Shorner smacked Harry across the back of his head as they walked through the brightly lit hallway.

"I'll go out on a limb and say that was a good 8.5."

"If you ever try that again, I'll be the one to put the final nail in your coffin. Tread carefully around here, Harry. You're not the only one who will go down if this thing falls to pieces."

The dark haired man glanced over at him, thin crescents of luminescent green studying Shorner from the corners of his eyes. "Why are you so worried about Blackwood?" he queried, waiting for a group of chattering employees decked out in the dark navy of Field Surveillance to pass in the other direction. "What do you know that I don't?"

Shorner stopped walking. "For all your savvy, Harry, I'm surprised you can't see it."

Harry turned and faced Shorner, face unreadable.

"He fears you. It's as simple as that. He fears for his position, he fears for retribution and he fears your name. You carry a lot of weight, political and otherwise. And Connor has far too many skeletons in his closet to sleep well while you are around," Shorner licked his lips. "It probably doesn't help that you also put his second in command into the permanent residence ward at St. Mungo's."

Harry laughed under his breath and it was a humourless sound of something like a snake's hiss. "Considering that Crevan was part of the reason why Blackwood ended up having to eat baby food for the rest of his life, I thought it was a fitting end."

He choked on the words bubbling in his throat, feeling broadsided in the face of Harry's revelation. "What? No, just no. Crevan's an easy-going bloke. He's been friends with Connor for years, since they both began working here. I may not like him that much, but that doesn't sound like him. He couldn't have done that by his own volition."

Harry looked away, expression tight and brittle around the edges. "I'm sorry, Archie. I wish I had something other than bad news for you," he said with no trace of the smug confidence he'd worn in front of Connor Blackwood. "War changes people. And it doesn't bring out our best qualities."

"Are you sure he would have done the same thing this time around?" The question slipped out of his mouth before he could fully understand its ramifications.

"No, but now I know for sure," Harry replied unabashedly. "Admittedly, Blackwood was a bit of a joke in my time. But he apparently kept things running smooth around here, and when he took a sudden retirement to the St. Mungo's vegetable ward, it started a cascading series of disasters. I'm fairly sure that Scrimgeour's rise to absolute power came out of that whole crisis."

None of this felt right. None of it _was_ right. It was killing the criminal before he even committed the crime and there was no integrity in that. He wasn't stupid enough though to believe that Harry was in it for something as trite as justice, but it didn't sit well with him that Harry could and _would_ kill at will, whom and when he wanted. It felt too much like he was playing _God_. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Shorner began understand just how little he knew about Harry; the ease with which they interacted and the passiveness with which he'd accepted Harry's story still unnerved him. A profile and a few emotionally charged conversations did not tell one everything they needed to know about a person.

Shorner's jaw ached from grinding his teeth together. "I'm not disagreeing with you, Harry. But, stop and think. Are you fighting a war that hasn't started yet on the assumption that fighting it will prevent it? I'm not quite sure of your reasoning here."

Harry's eyes widened. "Whoa, whoa, hang on a second. What the hell are you talking about? 'Cause Crevan, he fucked a lot of things up _before_ he took out Blackwood. Magical artefacts, files on old cases, agent profiles and personal histories, money – you name it. It disappeared when he disappeared. He's a fucking coward, Archie. He turned tail and ran right when the war was starting to get bad. Blackwood caught wind of him wanting to defect and when he confronted Crevan, the little bastard took him out."

Shorner crossed his arms and regarded Harry through a narrowed gaze. Harry stared back, eyes as smooth and deep as a forest lake, something almost alien lurking in their depths.

"May I help you two gentlemen?" Madam Mallard's crisp tones reverberated off the corridor's walls, interrupting their confrontation. Her expression suggested that she'd had a close encounter with a very sour lemon, and it had done nothing to improve her temperament.

Harry smiled at her, lids half-shielding the green of his irises. "No Madam. Just a disagreement between two old friends."

He rolled his eyes, half at Harry's abrupt turnabout in personality and half at the fact he knew this wouldn't be the last time they'd have this conversation.

Madam Mallard sniffed. "You're blocking the hallway. Please take your dispute elsewhere."

Kicking Harry in the shins, Shorner ignored his indignant yelp and inclined his head respectfully towards the aging Head of British Wizarding Security. "Pardon us Madam Mallard; we were just leaving."

Dodging the short-tempered woman, Shorner pushed Harry forward in the direction of the DoM's archives.

When they were out of earshot, Harry spoke, "Ah, the _esteemed_ Madam Mallard. That bitch has an ego the size of Siberia and about the disposition to match. Believe me when I say she will not age gracefully or with diplomacy. And you're abusive."

"You know you love it," Shorner drawled. "How come you never give _me_ the 'come hither' smile? Don't I mean anything to you?"

"Aww, Archie, do you feel bereaved? As much as you may be a woman, you're still an ugly bastard at heart."

"Arse," Shorner laughed as he pushed open the door to the DoM's collection of records. He followed the short flight of stairs to below ground and the room opened up into a stark, white expanse of black filing cabinets fanning outward in perfect rows. Spotlessly clean and organized to the point of anal retentiveness, the room would not have looked out of place in a Muggle supercomputer facility. He pulled open one of the filling cabinets that held field agent records and crammed Harry's well-modified file in between Shatz, Michele and another agent long lost to obscurity.

"She died in here."

Shorner glanced over his shoulder at Harry. "Who?"

"An old girlfriend of mine. She bled out right about there," he pointed to a spot a few steps to Shorner's left. "The Ministry fell that day. I got the news from Ron that Death Eaters had invaded and I came to help. A lot of good I did here; you had to pull me away from her body. I'd gone into shock."

Shorner blinked and gave Harry an overexaggerated scowl in an attempt to lighten the sudden pall cast over the room. "Could you possibly be anymore depressing to be around?"

The younger man shook his head and grinned, recognizing the ploy for what it was. "You know what they say – depression is anger without enthusiasm."

"And you would know all about that wouldn't you?" Shorner replied sardonically, digging through his robes' voluminous pockets for an elusive metal chain.

Harry snorted inelegantly. "Damn straight. I was an angsty son-of-a-bitch as a teenager," he said, a wide grin on his face as Shorner began searching through his front trouser pockets. "Keeping looking you'll find it."

"Like you've got anything to brag about." Shorner growled as he pulled a shining silver time-turner from his pocket. "Think fast," he said tossing it towards Harry. He plucked it from the air much like a professional seeker would a snitch. Shorner continued, "I don't think I have to tell you to be discrete with this. It's one of Experimental Magics' time-turners and it just so happens to be unregistered with no serial numbers or tracking charms."

"Convenient," Harry drawled, dangling the device in front of his face. "You know, there's something I don't get. If you don't want me at Hogwarts, why are you helping me?"

"Because it's easier to convince you to check in with me regularly than to convince you not to go back. Because you have unfinished business there that has nothing to do with the DoM. Because you need absolution. Take your pick," he said, turning around to head back to his office. If Harry's smile was suddenly a bit more watery than usual, Shorner carefully ignored it. "If you get me into trouble, they'll never find your body."

"Hey! Have a little faith in me, you asshole. I'm crazy, not incompetent," Harry yelled after him.

Shorner made a rude gesture over his shoulder.

* * *

Connor Blackwood flipped through his copy of the young Sharr Lord's files as he waited for the door to swing shut behind Shorner.

'Archie', Hadrian Sharr had called him, which implied a close, working relationship between them. Despite the notoriously bizarre appetites of dark veela, Connor knew it wasn't from… _feeding_. In fact, it seemed almost a friendship, one possibly born of many years.

Connor carefully revised his opinion of Shorner. With what he knew now, the man could be dangerous.

Hadrian Sharr, while an arrogant and discomforting person to be around, was a very powerful dark wizard who was both a wilful and clever killer. And, he had apparently been employed for eleven years right under his nose. This was troubling and also, intriguing. Connor pulled out a fresh sheet of cream-coloured parchment.

_Lucius, old friend,_ he wrote. _There is something you might find interesting..._

* * *

"_/Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed / Everybody knows that the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost/"_

The MacGyvered radio tilted precariously on the open windowsill. Multi-coloured wires peaked out from its broken plastic face, Leonard Cohen ringing out from the Muggle station Harry managed to tap into through the Leaky Cauldron's wards.

"_/Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That's how it goes / Everybody knows/"_

Harry riffled through the collection of essays he'd managed to bullshit his way through last night. He snorted softly before tucking the parchment away in the corner of his trunk. Damn it was weird to be going back to school. He stuffed his old robes in on top of his books, being too frugal to have bought new ones when a simple re-sizing charm would work just as well.

Of course, there was also the small fact that Harry was only going to be at Hogwarts for one year. At the end of the year, he'd cite a need for anonymity or security as a reason for leaving and "switch" to private tutoring for the rest of his education. For everything else, he'd just have to wing it. Besides, he was only there to get in, capture Wormtail, say his goodbyes and get out.

He slammed the lid of his trunk shut and swept a pair of robes into an old knapsack. All of his weapons were at a Muggle storage unit, including his primary wand. Aside from his growing arsenal, Harry knew he couldn't bring his real wand with him. It literally radiated too much dark magic for him to be able to bring it to Hogwarts. Harry sighed and shoved his discomfort to the back of his mind.

On the bed lay a pair of glasses, a ring and a change of clothes. This was all that would stand between him and the persona he would assume.

In the summer before his sixth year, he'd created Harrison Black, the bastard son of Sirius Black. A seemingly shallow and gregarious playboy, Harrison Black was the identity in which he'd acquired access to the black markets and a few other unsavoury places. The persona of Harrison Black also played an important part in his introduction to the dark arts.

Then there was Mal, the name he had used as a special operative for the DoM. Mal was a soldier in the Muggle world for three years before being dishonourably discharged for excessive violence, weapons trafficking, insubordination and whole list of other juicy details designed to make him more 'appealing' to the Special Forces program. In all actuality, Harry had no choice about joining the DoM, who were apparently a bit touchy about him killing off non-convicted citizens – even if they were known Death Eaters. Fucking red tape.

He had no intention of telling Shorner that he was little better than a convicted criminal himself. But knowing Shorner, the man had probably come to that conclusion already. Special Forces was known for taking in the more _malleable_ individuals of the criminal element and turning them into 'useful' members of society.

There was also Spencer Grutton, a middle level Death Eater whose tongue had been cut out by unknown assailants and had a penchant for vicious silent curses. Allen Leighton, Muggle refugee and prisoner of the Dark Lord. Jonathan Bates – a skilled thief and spy. Mark Vendez, Paul Woffard, Fredrick Minks – the list was substantial. Harry often wondered if he shouldn't have pursued a career in acting.

And now his own name was to be added to the list. Harry knew he shouldn't be feeling like somebody had shoved meat hooks into his gut; Harry James Potter was no longer his name. It was now a fictional character, a role he'd play just like the rest. He'd sacrificed worse before. But it still hurt.

"Because it is my _name_," Harry said out loud to the empty room, the words ringing in his ears. "Because I _cannot_ have another in my life! Because I _lie _and sign myself to lies! _Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang!_ How may I live without my _name_? I have given you my _soul_; leave me my _name_!"

He grinned without mirth, feeling half-mad with the desire to tear his possessions apart and run, far, far away from himself and every Goddamn thing that went with it.

'_Not quite Daniel Day-Lewis, but I do well enough in my own right.'_

So there beget the question: who was Harry Potter? A boy? A wizard? An orphan? A stray kid who had more power at his fingertips than he knew what to do with? A person who struggled with that damnable self-hatred born from neglect? Someone who struggled with the fame and notoriety of the position he was suddenly thrust into on top of entering a new world that he had known nothing of?

Well, fuck, when he put it like that…

Shy, he'd have to say. Shy and self-effacing. Not quite timid, but small, small in stature, small in the way he had held himself, in the way he had thought of himself. Harry had tried so damn hard to make himself seem mediocre and just like everyone else.

Funny how people change and yet here he was, face to face with his younger self and not sure of who was looking back at him in the mirror.

Harry shook out the clothes on the bed and pulled on the loose jeans and t-shirt. They were large enough to hide the bulk of his build, but not enough so as to hinder his movement. He slid the ring onto his finger and watched in the mirror as his skin began to change. It was like watching a paintbrush glide down his body, wiping away the worst of the scars and leaving only pale, supple skin behind. The slim, silver framed glasses went on next and then there was somebody else in the mirror, someone who looked much closer to "Harry Potter".

The ring, the most ingenious part of his disguise, laid a faint Glamour against his skin, surprising Harry with just how young he looked without the myriad of scaring, tattoos and spellburns on his body. They had become such an integral part of his self-image that he felt naked without them.

Glamours, by their nature, were not very hard to cast if one had a creative enough mind to build the image. They were also not very hard to detect and to see through. Most Glamours were tied to the skin; the constant growth and death of the top epidermal layer caused the glamour to weaken as the spell then had to rely on the user's constant reinforcement. Not only was it tiring, it wasted a lot of magic. And yet, when anchored to a solid metal object, they required little to no maintenance and were virtually impossible to detect. The black markets ran a surplus of cheap metal jewellery cast with Glamours that could be easily manipulated to the user's preference.

The downside was that they were highly illegal given how many ways they could be abused. The user could end up with anything from a ten thousand galleon fine to ten years in Azkaban depending on the level of transgression. Not that it had ever stopped him before.

Harry pulled on a few more layers of clothing and made a face in the mirror. Time to test it out. With a gesture and a thought, the radio vanished, bathing the room in silence as he closed the door.

He stomped down the stairs in a sort of hunched shuffle, like he wasn't quite used to his height yet and wasn't sure where the rest of his body should go. An awkward, "Potterish" motion – much different than the loose-limbed, liquid saunter he normally fell into.

It was a shitty disguise, but it worked its magic well. People only ever saw what they wanted to and Harry didn't mind using that against them.


	12. Impetus: Part A

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Eleven

Impetus

_Part A_

It was the sound of voices that attracted Draco to the sliver of light shining through the crack in the study's door.

His father stood in front of the elaborately carved wooden cabinet that he kept all of his most expensive beverages; firelight gleamed off of rows of glass decanters, some of the liquids within as dark and thick as spilt blood and others, a rich light gold. Lucius pulled out a crystal decanter carved with a delicate ivy pattern and a pair of short, fat glasses with a matching detail of vines. They went onto the table with a muffled thump and then another man came into the view from the crack of the door.

Huge and daunting, Connor Blackwood, or Uncle Connor as Draco had known him in his early years, towered over even his father's impressive height and seemed even more colossal by the breadth of his shoulders. Wizards were not generally a very tall race of people, valuing power, swiftness of thought and skill more so than strength or height. Most wizards and witches were less than 5'9, save for a few of the pureblooded families like his own, the Blacks or God help him, the Weasleys.

"I had the most _unpleasant_ encounter in Diagon Alley the other day," his father announced, settling back in his chair.

Blackwood chuckled a he poured himself a glass of Lucius' finest whiskey. "Really?" he drawled. "Was it as bad as the Weasley incident in the bookstore last year? Aren't you a little old for fisticuffs, Lucius?"

Draco muffled a snicker.

"Oh do shut-up," his father replied, glowering at Blackwood through a curtain of fair hair.

"I keep hearing you described as this calm, collected individual, cool-headed in the face of perilous situations and I go, 'That's not the Lucius _I_ know'," Blackwood replied teasingly. "Sometimes I wonder if it was _I_ who should have been the Slytherin and _you_ the Gryffindor considering that temper of yours."

"Ah, but therein lies the difference. _I_ am capable of controlling my temper whereas you…"

"All in fair play, old friend. All in fair play," Blackwood said with a smile. "What was this 'unpleasant encounter' about?"

Lucius knocked back the rest of the whiskey in his glass and leant forward, arms braced on his knees, eyes pensive and distant. He spoke finally, voice just as far away as his eyes. "He was young, I'll give you that. But I am sure he was much older than he appeared. It was only for a moment, one bare, pale second, but the last time I tasted magic like that was over fifteen years ago when the Dark Lord tried to summon a demon of the Old World."

The Ministry agent's face drew tight and worried. "You never told me about that," he said softly.

"That's because it ended horribly. Fourteen of us dead or worse and it seemed like a hole had opened in the universe. The demon was almost through when it collapsed; it looked at me, past where the Dark Lord had fallen to the ground, and saw me, saw all of me, my magic, my mind, everything I'd done. And the air around me grew faces of dead things and they whispered, so hungry, so violent that I was afraid to breathe because they would slip inside me and tear me apart. The air was so full of dark magic I could feel it like knives on my skin and I thought I would choke on the smell of death. Sometimes even now, I look at shadows and wonder if there's something staring back at me."

"Merlin," Blackwood breathed, looking more than a little staggered by his revelation. Draco had only heard vague references to demons before; they were considered to be a fairy tale at best by most of the wizarding world.

Lucius smiled grimly. "The follies of youth, I suppose."

Blackwood exhaled and set his tumbler down with a solid thunk on the table. "Let me guess. That young man in the Alley: nineteen, green eyes, black hair, pale skin, looked like some pretty boy whore's get."

"Crude, but succinct," Lucius replied dryly.

"I think you've had the dubious pleasure of encountering the latest Sharr Lord."

Lucius' hand seized and his glass shattered on the floor. "I… wasn't aware they were still alive," he said blithely as if the luxurious Persian carpet at his feet wasn't covered in broken crystal. "When did this one turn up?"

"That's a very good question," Conner said, cleaning up the remains of the glass with a flick of his wand and conjuring Lucius a new glass. The heavy quartz tumbler wasn't the same quality as his father's original glass, but conjured objects were funny like that. "Apparently he's been under George's command since the beginning," the man continued.

"George Pryce? He was the one who started the Special Forces program, yes?" At Black wood's nod of confirmation, his mouth tightened visibly. "Do you think Sharr was Pryce's pet project?"

Blackwood laughed and the sound was cruel and insinuating. "Amongst other things, probably."

Lucius smiled. "He does have a fairly interesting background. His mother was Dark Veela?" At Connor's nod he continued. "Is Sharr one of Lilith's Brood or is he a common parasite?"

"We don't know," Blackwood said, lifting his shoulders in an approximation of a shrug. "There are no records of him actually Changing. He might not be able to at all."

"You never can tell with half-breeds. It certainly explains why he was assigned to the 'Potter' job if he couldn't. Can you imagine the havoc a half-Dark Veela could wreck at Hogwarts? Let alone an awakened one," murmured Lucius, a thin smile crossing his face.

"Ha! Glad I'm not there anymore. I'm just not sure of what I think about Shorner. He's never been a big player in anybody's game. In fact, that's half the reason why he got the job as Head of Experimental Magics. He was busy doing his own thing and running the department. A bit of a loner, really. Or at least that's what I thought," he said.

Lucius leaned over and topped up his glass, amber liquid gleaming in the firelight. "How long do you think they've known each other?"

Connor snorted humourlessly, setting the glass down with a muffled thunk against the solid oak table. "Before today I didn't even know Hadrian Sharr existed – let alone that he's friends with Shorner. I thought we had…" He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a headache. "…just some random lunatic pinging the alarms. Turns out we actually have a Sharr Lord on our hands. Isn't this bloody wonderful?"

Blackwood shook his head, a soft exhale of laughter escaping him. "Shorner began working for the DoM at nineteen and just out of school, so he's been there about eighteen years. Sharr, on the other hand, was fifteen when the Dark Lord fell. He entered the program about two years later when Shorner became Head of Experimental Magics."

The pale haired pureblood's eyes widened incredulously. "Fifteen?" he breathed. "A bit more believable than a baby, but _fifteen_? Sweet Merlin, what did he have to sacrifice for that?"

"His sister apparently, whom you know of as the late Lily Potter," Connor said dryly. "James Potter married _up_ from his station. Isn't that a laughable irony?"

"I never saw any of that in her; she covered it too well. We always thought she was just another Muggleborn at Hogwarts. After I left school and fell in with the Dark Lord, well, I didn't hear much about her until the Potter child was born. Or was that a hoax as well?"

Blackwood shrugged. "Sharr claims Harry Potter to have been his nephew. The child allegedly died that night, but I wouldn't put it past him to have secreted the kid away to keep him safe – this is becoming increasingly convoluted! Where does Sharr end and the truth begin?"

Lucius' mouth curled into a shadow of his usual smirk. "Truth is often the first casualty in war."

"Funny you should say that."

"Oh?" his father replied, a pale eyebrow climbing towards his hairline.

"Sharr also claims that he and his sister only defeated the Dark Lord. He said, 'My sister and I banished Voldemort back to his souly bits, but we didn't kill him.' Not sure what you'll make of that, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that the Dark Lord is not as gone as we hoped."

Lucius' hand spasmed again, but this time he managed not to drop the glass. "No," he said, the word barely more than an exhale. "_No_."

The larger man fixed him with a steady look, taking the glass from Lucius' shaking hands. "You know I never agreed with your decision to join the Dark Lord. For someone who fanatically believes in the purity of blood, you were surprisingly ready to cast aside your pride and kiss the feet of a half-blood. You know good and well what the Dark Lord was before he gained power."

His father bowed his head, pale hair hiding his features from view and Draco felt an unusual pang or concern for his father's well-being. "I cannot put my family through that again. Draco was barely two years old when _He_ fell. At this age, I would be commanded to groom my son for recruitment. I cannot, _will not_ do that to him. Draco deserves to grow-up free of _His_ influence. As much as it disappoints me to say this, he is the kind of person who would be grossly warped by the Dark Lord rather than made stronger because of his experiences."

The hot bite of shame bubbled in Draco's stomach. Was he not powerful enough to please his father?

Blackwood was talking again. "…perhaps Sharr could take care of the problem for you."

"Trade one dark lord for another?" his father replied scornfully. "Mayhap I'll be lucky and they'll kill each other off."

The Ministry agent laughed. "Yes! And I could move Shorner into a little dead-end office where he can happily tinker away the rest of his days and be a thorn in my side no more."

His father snorted inelegantly. "Your grasp of the dramatic is paltry at best, my friend. I'm grateful you didn't pursue theatre. I'd hate to see a man of your size in that ridiculous getup." Lucius tossed back the last of his whiskey, fair hair flying back. "How did Shorner even get involved in this particular mess?" he drawled, a hint of the heavy liquor roughing his voice.

"He made this big stink about Potter and Sharr being the same person. Kind of sloppy if you ask me," Blackwood rejoined.

Lucius' eyebrows rose. "He might not have known. They could very easily have lost touch with each other."

Connor chuckled, dark and weary. "How? The two of them are as thick as thieves. It worries me though. Shorner never makes mistakes, not heavy-handed moves like that."

"It could be a ploy. You've told me many times that Special Forces is rough on the operatives. The average life span of a field agent is what, three, maybe four years? Sharr's made an eleven year career out of this; Shorner has probably been helping him this entire time."

Blackwood leaned forward, tracing his lower lip with his index finger – a curious gesture of deep contemplation. "I thought of that." He stood pacing towards the large picture window. "If it is a ploy then what do they want? Money? Power? Revenge?" He shook his head. "But I can't find anything wrong with their story or Sharr's files as suspicious as it all seems. Sharr was… is supposed to be the bait in a one man trap to capture and kill Death Eaters."

"Sharr Lords are noted for being mavericks." Lucius chuckled and crossed his ankles on the low-lying table. "I suppose when he starts doing things that actually make sense we should truly be worried."

Blackwood said nothing, a giant black shadow outlined in moonlight and fire looming in the window frame.

"Connor?"

"Sharr took out La Muerte over a month back," he said turning from the window, an unpleasant smile gracing his features. "I hear they're still finding pieces of him and a few hundred of his friends in the surrounding jungle."

Lucius' eyes went comically wide. _"Sweet Morgana, no!"_ He stood and paced in front of the fireplace. "How many people were on his team?" he asked, unusually harried.

"Just him. Apparently, it was on Pryce's last orders, but the way the necromancer was executed smacks of revenge. Hadrian Sharr is an arrogant bastard, but he seems a cold and calculating one. If he's making a move now…" A muscle in his jaw jumped. "I'm not comfortable with this. I don't know what he wants or what he's going to do next. And I haven't the foggiest idea of how the hell I'm going to deal with him and Shorner," he said joining Lucius in front of the fireplace.

"I would recommend stepping very carefully around Sharr. You don't want him going to ground again or we'll never find him. Shorner is our leverage against that and we don't want to provoke either of them. My… _encounter_ has left me rather leery of Sharr and his magic. There are few I would put up against him and bet on coming out alive in a fair fight. If what Sharr claims is true, there's a good reason why he won against the Dark Lord. The Sharr Family _is_ rumoured to be the mortal offspring of a dead god. There is much we don't know about the Old World outside of myth and fanciful stories."

Draco could recognize a dismissal when he heard one. Scrambling back from the door, he tip-toed down the corridor to around the corner. When the _hiss_ and _whoosh_ of the Floo sounded he walked calmly back to his father's office and tapped on the door.

His father's voice, tired and wan, drifted through the door. "Come in, Draco."

He winced. Not as subtle as he thought. Draco pushed open the door and stopped short at the sight of his father slumped in the chair, looking far older than his thirty-nine years and like the world had been ripped from under his feet. "Father?"

Lucius didn't reply. If Draco hadn't known better he would have said his father was shell-shocked. "Sir?" he asked again, coming further into the study. "Dad?" he said softly, grasping his father's hand.

Perhaps it was the crude honorific that did the trick and perhaps it hadn't even registered, but his father blinked and smiled, turning grey-blue eyes upon his own similar ones. "Draco," he said tones warm and fond. "Never doubt how proud I am of you. I simply wish…" He trailed off.

"Wish what, Father?" Draco prodded enquiringly.

"Many things, Draco." His gaze took on the glazed look of seeing through someone without actually looking at them. "But mostly," he paused and sighed. "I do so wish you had made friends with Potter instead of driving him away."

Draco tilted his head to the side in a silent question. When his father didn't continued, he decided to boldly plunge ahead. "Is it because the Sharr Lord is working with Harry Potter?"

Lucius' eyes cleared and focused, a smirk gracing his lips. "Partially," he replied, taking a moment to glance at the clock over Draco's shoulder. "It's late. You should get some rest."

"Yes sir." Draco rose from his crouch in front of his father's chair and walked towards the door, robes whispering as they brushed against the study's furnishings.

"Draco." His father's voice didn't grow louder, but it seemed to fill the study with sound. He glanced back at Lucius, now sitting straight in his chair.

"Sir?"

"Under no circumstances are you to provoke Potter."

Draco bowed his head, mind overflowing with unanswered questions and information that led nowhere at all. "Yes Father."

* * *

Perhaps May Sarton said it best: Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed.

Platform nine and three quarters was just as soggy as the rest of London, but it didn't hold quite the same level of "Wet", "Grey" and "Miserable" as the Muggle part of the city. Maybe it was vibrant red steam engine with its smoky plumage. Maybe it was the candy-coloured wizarding robes and the brilliant haze of magic floating through the air. Or maybe it was the children. Harry hadn't seen this large of a group of children together since Voldemort stormed Hogwarts.

He stumbled through the crowd feeling drunk and stupefied by the sheer amount of people crammed into one small space, leaving him gawking like a goddamned tourist of all things. _'Like you've never seen a witch wearing an orange-feathered tutu with sherbet striped tights.'_

No, wait! Harry looked again.

Was that even a witch? He shuddered. "This many wizards in one place trying to out-Muggle each other and it's like the fucking Love Parade has come to town," Harry muttered to himself. One of the passing sixth year girls heard him and laughed. He remembered himself in time and managed to suppress the leer and smiled bashfully instead.

'_Down boy. Shy and insecure, remember?'_ He ducked his head down and shuffled off towards the gaggle of redheads by the train, trying vainly to ignore the gleeful repetition of _Jailbait! Jailbait!_ his mind kept crowing at him.

Mr. and Mrs. Weasley seemed to be looking over their shoulders for something, but the children were keeping it together well-enough to have some fun. Harry eased his way over to them as much as he could in his "Potter shuffle" as he'd dubbed the slow, ungainly shamble.

It was heartbreaking to see them all alive and well.

Fred was bent nearly double, whimpering with the sort of helpless laughter that screwed up blood flow and coherent thought.

"…See, now. Mine's longer than yours." Ron declared waving his wand around under George's nose.

George snickered. "You know, it's not the size of the wand that counts,"

"It's where you get to put it," Fred finished, beginning to wheeze for breath.

Ron, by this time, had begun to turn a brilliant shade of tomato and Hermione was holding both hands over her mouth, eyes the size of dinner plates. She seemed a strange combination of both shocked and amused, like she couldn't quite believe the words coming out of their mouths.

Harry grinned. "Or where you don't depending on how cheesy your pick-up line is."

Heads swivelled to stare incredulously at him and Harry didn't have to fake a blush.

"Hey," he said softly, looking down at his feet.

Then Hermione's weight hit him like a train and nearly bore him down. A high-pitched ringing in his ears told him that the young witch was squealing in delight. Harry struggled with shock, her warm weight feeling like a particularly vivid dream, one he would wake from to real world of blood, tears and madness. When it came down to it, Harry had gotten used to hurting. It was just something that was there; he accepted it, he moved on. He'd become so used to carrying a burden that when was finally gone, Harry didn't quite know what to do with himself. He blinked back the wetness in his eyes, something raw in his throat and it felt suspiciously like a sob.

'_I think I'm going to pass out.'_

No.

Not here.

Not now.

Not after he'd been through all of that and worse. He wrenched himself away from the memories and managed to hug Hermione back.

"Damn, it's good to see you guys," Harry murmured, voice gone husky and thick with repressed emotion. "How have you been?"

Fred whistled slowly. "You got big on us, mate. What have they been feeding you?"

Harry blinked then frowned. "You didn't expect me to stay a midget forever, did you?" he replied indignantly.

Hermione gave him a gentle nudge with her elbow. "Don't mind them. They've been winding everyone up today."

"Ron too, apparently."

She smiled, a glimmer of humour sparking in her expression. "He _did_ set himself up for that one."

Harry stifled a laugh as Ron whirled on them. "What's this? Pick on Ron Day?"

'_It should be difficult being around them,'_ Harry thought as Ron and Hermione harped at each other. It should have, but it wasn't. He should be feeling disconnected from them, feeling anguished, feeling lost. But mostly, he just felt content.

This was enough. Just looking at their faces and hearing their voices was enough to silence the thin cry of misery inside himself that he had long given up appeasing.

'_Archie was onto something when he said "absolution".'_

Mrs. Weasley came up and enfolded him in a hug. "How are you doing, dear? You were looking a bit peaky there for a minute."

Molly Weasley, mother that she was, keenly picked up on his suffering with the kind of pinpoint accuracy that scared him. This woman could pick apart his Potter guise with almost no trouble at all; she'd known him before the whole time-travel gig. Any inconsistencies would be instantly spotted. Harry immediately felt guilty though, for regarding her with such callous consideration.

"I'm alright, Mrs. Weasley. Just a little tired. This summer was far more interesting than I liked," he replied with a soft smile.

A motherly look lit her face, one Harry remembered from the orphaned children she'd taken in once the war got underway and she briefly touched his cheek. "My, you are growing _so_ tall." She smiled and Harry could see the faint touch of nostalgia in her expression. Then Ginny drew her away and Fred and George sidled up beside him.

"We had a hectic time trying to get everyone out of the Leaky Cauldron this morning," George muttered to him.

Fred snorted. "It probably didn't help that Percy was going off the deep end on us on top of trying to keep Hermione's new pet from attacking Ron's ankles."

Harry could feel the smile creeping its way onto his face "Uh-oh. What's this?"

"Well, it's a scraggly looking thing. And we're not quite sure," Fred began.

"But it's either a very small lion or a something that got dipped into one Snape's potions experiments," said George, voice gone dry with sarcasm.

Fred looked thoughtful. "Sorta looks like it got bashed in the face with something as a kitten."

Harry laughed. Crookshanks wasn't winning any beauty prize contests anytime soon.

"And that's not all," Ron said, coming up on Harry's other side. "That mad cat of hers went dashing across the table and managed to spill tea all over Percy's picture of Penelope Clearwater. You know, his _girlfriend_?Thought he would go into fits."

He frowned, not being able to bring up a clear picture of the girl in question. "Penelope? I know this person, I know I do. She's a Ravenclaw, right? Long, curly brown hair, very leggy, very curvy?"

"That's the one," Fred chirped merrily.

Oh. Yeah. That one. Ahhh, many a pleasant teenaged fantasy spawned from her. "Wow, not bad, Perce, not bad at all."

George guffawed. "Seems wee Harry started growing in more ways than one."

Hermione rolled her eyes as she came up beside them. "Oh come off it. He didn't say anything you weren't already thinking anyways."

"But that isn't the point, Hermione,"

"We're _supposed_ to take the mickey out of him,"

"Rites of Passage and all."

Her hands went to her hips. "So that thing with Percy this morning, you hiding his Head Boy badge, that was just a rite of passage too?"

"We didn't _hide_ it from him,"

"We only borrowed it," George finished, an unholy light of glee gleaming in his eyes.

"They changed it to say 'Bighead Boy' last night. Percy hasn't found a way to spell it back yet," Ron whispered to him, mindful of his father and the owner of said badge talking intently not four feet away. Harry made a quick note of how harried Mr. Weasley appeared and caught enough of the conversation to know he was asking Percy to _"…keep an eye on Harry. Make sure he doesn't go off alone or…"_ Ron dragged him back into the other conversation before he could finish reading their lips. "'Course I don't feel bad for him and all. Not when he's been so insufferable this summer."

Harry's teeth ground together involuntarily. Percy stalking him would throw a cramp in his plans. _'Fucking hell, man! Gimme a break! God save me from people who think they're doing me a favour.'_

"Hate to see what he'll be like at Hogwarts," Harry said, raising an eyebrow.

Hermione rolled her eyes again; he got the feeling she'd been doing that a lot in his absence. "He's not _that_ bad. To hear these two jokers go on about it, you'd think he was some kind of tyrant. They even tried locking him in a pyramid to get rid of him."

'_Can't fault them for a crime of opportunity. I'm all out of convenient pyramids to leave the pompous asshole in.'_

"We didn't lock him in there, we just shut the door," retorted George.

Fred nodded. "Bill would have found him eventually."

Ron laughed uproariously, voice cracking and squeaking in the middle, initiating a whole new round of teasing.

Mr. Weasley tapped Harry on the shoulder, seeming oddly nervous for such a well-balanced person.

This time around, Harry could pick out the lines of tension around his mouth and eyes, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and a barely noticeable tremor in his hands. His Godfather's escape had not been kind to Mr. Weasley. "Harry, if I could have a word with you?" he said, jerking his head towards the shadows of a support column.

"Of course," Harry replied, following the older man. _'Ah, I remember this.'_

"I need to tell you something before you leave for Hogwarts." Mr. Weasley took off his Muggle cap and made a few half-hearted attempts at starting a conversation. Harry let him fumble about for a bit before taking pity on him.

"Is this about Sirius Black," he inquired.

Mr. Weasley looked surprised. "Yes, how… How did you know?"

Harry smiled despite himself. "I had the opportunity to meet him this summer."

The Weasley patriarch's mouth flopped open like a fish's.

'_Dance fast, Harry.'_

He continued. "I mean, I was alright, a group of Ministry wizards got to me before he could."

"Aurors?" Mr. Weasley queried, looking a little less pole-axed.

"No," Harry replied, shaking his head. "They weren't dressed like any Aurors I know of. They wore a black uniform with a blue stripe down the side – kind of like Muggle soldiers actually."

"_Good Lord!"_ the red haired man breathed, brown eyes gone wide and shocked.

Harry tried not to take too much amusement from the situation. "Oh, I'm fine," he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and smiling sheepishly. "One of them took me to a safe-house in London before moving me to Germany, somewhere tropical and then I think the States. It was a lot of fun other than, you know, not having a whole lot of people to talk to."

A loud whistle sounded and people started loading onto the train.

"Gotta run," Harry said to Mr. Weasley.

The man gathered up his composure and nodded, patting Harry on the shoulder. "Off you go now."

Harry dashed over to where Ron was holding the door open for him and jumped in. As the two of them waved to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, a small twinge of guilt started in his heart before Harry ruthlessly shoved it away. If anyone in the Order had the clearance needed to acquire his new and improved files, Shorner would confirm his story as the proprietor of Harry Potter's folder.

Luck, as he had found, was a combination of opportunity and preparedness. After the last ten hellish years of his life, Harry was prepared for just about anything. Opportunity was just how he interpreted his present situation.


	13. Impetus: Part B

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Twelve

Impetus

_Part B_

The world was not a kind place and at nearly fourteen-years-old, Hermione Granger knew it well. It had a tongue as sharp as razors and a fickle disposition to boot. And it certainly didn't favour the different, the freethinking or the curious. For all that the world claimed to be entering the Information Age, it was surprisingly reticent towards those who didn't adhere to or better yet, _conform_ to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

Funny how that worked out.

Hermione waited patiently in the train's corridor for Ron and Harry. A few of her year mates passed her and waved, but nobody bothered to stop and talk to her. There had always been a gaping chasm between her and the rest of her peers even in primary school; whether it was from being an outspoken Muggleborn witch or from being the genius of her class, she'd come to accept the gap as a regular part of her life, turning to books instead of friends and perpetuating the vicious cycle of self-imposed isolation. If that made her a bit anti-social or unable to hold meaningful relationships with the people her age, then consequences were consequences and everything else be damned. That wasn't to say she hadn't had several acquaintances she talked to on a regular basis, but for a long time, there'd been a severe dearth of the friends like Ron and Harry in her life.

It was something of a relief, breaking the glass wall that had separated herself from everybody else for so long. A sense of liberation, of peeling off the layer of cellophane that hazed her view of the world – _of simply being able to breathe_ – had infused her and for once, Hermione hadn't worried about saying something that would drive Ron and Harry away. It was refreshing not to be the only oddball out anymore.

What most people didn't know was that Hermione Granger possessed a surprising ability to shut-up and put-up when things got tough. She also had a streak of rebellion that the Hat had picked up on and promptly placed her Gryffindor much to her wishes otherwise. The two put together made for a clever and wilful mindset, one her friends, even at a young age, had come to appreciate as a part of her better qualities.

At eleven and twelve, boys were not known for being paragons of rational thought, most doing what popped into their heads first and worrying about the consequences later. They weren't able to hold complex conversations on properties alchemy or the study of genetics in wizarding world or any number of things. They weren't emotionally mature or even emotionally cognizant, as she had found in Ron's case.

But they were loyal, courageous and accepting and on that rare occasion – even sweet. Hermione had grown quite fond of her little collection of misfits.

They tromped back to her, nearly a head taller than everyone else around them, people seemingly parting in front of them like the Red Sea; with Harry's stark black locks and Ron's blazing red hair, they weren't hard to spot in a crowd. Taking point, she picked up Crookshanks' cat carrier and led them out of the crush of people in the middle of the train.

She took a quick assessing glance of her companions. Both of them had grown considerably over the summer, but it was the most surprising in Harry – especially considering how small he was at the end of second year. He wasn't skinny-lanky like Ron, but more of a lean and lithe lanky, all long limbs and hidden strength. He walked quietly along beside her, shoes scuffing on the floor, shoulders curled inward as if he were trying to hide just how _broad_ they actually were, moving far more carefully than the situation called for. It was like he was embarrassed by his size, not quite comfortable with all the changes his body had gone through.

Hermione looked him over again, then glanced over at Ron jabbering animatedly about Quidditch statistics on Harry's other side. They had to be within a hairsbreadth of each others' height.

She smiled. Damn, her boys were going to be _tall_. Harry misjudged the distance of his next step and stumbled over his large feet, bumping into Hermione's side.

He grimaced and bit his lip, curling even further into himself as he gazed at her with wide eyes. "Sorry! Are you okay?" he inquired in that new voice of his – a rich baritone that made her think of things like dark chocolate and blue cigarette smoke.

Ah, _that_ explained why he was moving so slow. Harry had never been clumsy; he had to be feeling twice as awkward with his growth spurt. _'Poor guy.'_

"It's alright, Harry. I'm fine." She hooked her arm through his. "But you could make it up to me by telling us where you were this summer."

He grinned at her, sudden and breathtaking. "Oh, I have loads to tell you guys. You wouldn't believe who showed up in my neighbourhood!" Harry glanced around. "I tell you more when we find a place to sit."

Ron jerked his thumb at one of the compartments. "Here's one. Oi, Ginny! Budge up!" he said, sliding the door open.

"Ron, don't!" But Hermione's protest went unheeded and the red haired girl was eventually booted from the compartment, despite Ginny's vehement objection.

The young witch pursed her lips. Harry hadn't done a thing to stop him; in fact he was still standing outside the compartment with his back to the wall, watching everyone who went past with keen interest.

He turned his head and smiled at her. It was an infectious grin and as irritated as she was, Hermione could hardly stop herself from smiling back. "Hey," he said, low and affectionate. "Ron done reasserting himself on the Weasley Family Pecking Order?"

She rolled her eyes then let out a huff of laughter despite herself. "What do you think?"

Harry raised his eyebrows. "No?" His lips curled upwards and Hermione hesitated to call it a smile; it held an odd note that she didn't quite understand and the skin on her spine went cold. "I think he might surprise you someday."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked. The lizard part of her brain, that primal, animal part of her wanted to slink away, slink back into the shadows and far away from that carefully shuttered green gaze.

Then he shrugged and the cool, flat manner slid away like water. Hermione slowly let out her breath and felt somewhat bewildered by her emotional response to her best friend.

'_What was that!'_ She filed the incident away in her mind, a sour dissonance that didn't fit with her previous perceptions of Harry. He was different than she remembered. A little _too_ different and she could hardly be blamed for her startled reaction. There was a capacity for violence within him where it hadn't before; it clung to him, to his skin, the smell of thunderstorms and tar.

Not good, not good at all. _'Harry, what happened to you?'_

Harry had continued. "You're an only child so you've always had your parents' attention. Ron, on the other hand, comes from a large family where attention needs to be distributed between all members. Not to mention he also has to compete with his siblings so that he feels he's worthy of their attention as well. It's not a conscious thing, but its there," he said.

It was stated so matter-of-factly that Hermione had to deliberately remind herself of who she was talking to. "That… actually makes sense. Are you sure you're feeling alright?"

Harry made a face at her. "Just because I'm lazy, doesn't mean I'm stupid."

There he was; there was her friend: half-hidden behind a tough-guy persona. She found herself laughing for the second time in less than five minutes and it helped dissipate the last of the strange coldness on her flesh. "Now, _that_ I could agree with."

"Are you two going to stand out there and talk all day?" Ron's surly tones came from the compartment.

Crookshanks stirred unhappily in the carrier and Hermione wobbled from his shifting weight.

"Here, let me get that."

She didn't have time to object before Harry was through the door, Crookshanks' basket in hand like it weighed no more than his worn-out canvas knapsack. _'Of course for him,'_ Hermione reminded herself, glancing at the breadth his shoulders. _'It probably doesn't.'_

"You didn't have to be so mean to your sister," Hermione said to Ron as she sat down, Crookshanks on one side and Harry on the other.

Ron dug in his pocket for the sandwiches his mother gave him. "It's not like she doesn't have other people in her year to sit with."

"She doesn't, Ron," Harry said gently. "Remember all of last year? Being possessed by a shade of Voldemort's soul doesn't exactly lend itself to a bunch of close-knit friends."

A chagrined look crossed the red-haired boy's face and Hermione marvelled at how easily Harry had gotten the point across. And how tactfully. Not a very thirteen-year-old behaviour. Harry _was_ a much more sensitive person than Ron, But she had her suspicions that it was a product of the abuse he'd received from the Dursleys, which had led to Harry being a very closed-off, moody kind of boy with a sharp temper and a quiet demeanour.

Harry's calm temperament and emotional control paired with his newfound verbal confidence painted a _very_ interesting picture of his summer.

And a _shade_ of Voldemort's soul? Not an actual possession? She made a mental note to stop by the Restricted Section of Hogwart's library. Professor Flitwick would undoubtedly sponsor another charms research project like the one she did when they were making Polyjuice.

"So what happened this summer?" Ron said around a mouthful of sandwich, referring to Harry's earlier statement. "You didn't answer any of our letters."

Harry's green eyes glittered with anticipation and the chill, stormy feeling was back in the air, only now it had also taken up residence in Hermione's stomach. "Three guesses at who showed up at Privet Drive and the first two don't count."

* * *

Hermione was fairly sure her jaw rested somewhere near the proximity of the floor.

Ron looked no better. "Sirius Black? Escaped to come after you? But why?"

"And why now?" Hermione blurted out. "Why after all these years, he picks now to come after you? What does he think he's going to get out of it?"

Harry shrugged. "I've been wondering that myself. Is it the phase of the moon in conjunction to Mars? Is it his mind suddenly coming back after twelve years in Hell's version of La-La land? Is it just somebody's mistake that he capitalized off of? Who knows? I couldn't get a straight answer out of anybody I talked to. He seems to be one of those dirty laundry subjects."

Hermione wrinkled her nose as she pondered this. "Did you even get the man's name who rescued you?"

"Nope. Never would answer me on that. Just told me to pack up and then he would Apparate us to the next safe-house. I mean, the times that he let me out, he gave me a name to call him while we were doing whatever it was we had to do at the time, sometimes it was getting food and other times it was business; he usually dumped me in a different location while he did that, like a park or something. It got pretty confusing there for a bit, which I think that was the point of the whole thing and I'm beginning to get the feeling that none of those were his real names. Better security, I guess."

Ron frowned at that. "Sounds like you didn't have much fun."

Harry gave a wry grin to Ron. "Well, it was definitely intriguing, but I'd never call that fun. Half the time I didn't even know what was going on. When I wasn't learning a dozen or so languages, I was being drilled on my spell-work. It was… tense; I don't think I've had a chance to relax until now."

"At least you didn't get stuck at the Dursleys again," Ron quipped. "I always knew you'd grow if you got proper feeding."

"Ron!" Hermione admonished indignantly and Harry laughed.

"I have to admit, I didn't starve this summer."

Hermione hugged him and laid her head on his shoulder. "I'm glad you're okay, Harry."

"Yeah, I am too."

Somewhere along the way, he'd acquired a different accent, pleasant to listen to in the way it rose and fell, but curious in the way he cut off certain vowels and emphasized others. It was a traveller's brogue, a subtle inflection that made it hard to pin down where the speaker was from.

It was a strange thing, a small thing, but it lent a bit of credibility his story of being taken by the ministry agent.

Hermione wondered if Harry knew just how deep he had gotten himself.

Then she remembered that earlier moment of strangeness in the train's corridor and wondered if _she_ knew how deep he had gotten himself.

The answer was quite obviously no.

* * *

It was hard not to feel guilty about lying to his friends – which was almost worse than lying to Mr. Weasley because these were the people that he had fought and died for, the ones who had made it worth the agony and exhaustion. But it was a stupid thing to feel bad about mostly because there was no way Harry could or would tell them the truth. The truth was Hell and it was so fucking insane, it was hard for even himself to believe it at times.

They didn't deserve to have to carry that kind of burden. Not while he could do something about it. Harry was beginning to understand Dumbledore better every day and it was not a position he appreciated being forced into.

So he'd sent Hermione on a wild goose-chase, plied her with a veritable labyrinth of intriguing information that held only dead ends to offer her curiosity. But she'd already picked up on him being not right; Hermione had recoiled in the corridor as if struck and Harry still wasn't sure what had set her off.

And to make matters worse, Wormtail was suspiciously absent. He peered at Crookshanks. The cat glared back at Harry as if he were the reason why the half-kneazle was stuffed in a cage.

'_Did _you _eat Pettigrew?'_ he wondered.

Nah. The cat lacked the smug, self-satisfied expression he held after a good mouse-hunt.

Ron snorted in his sleep, drool beginning to trickle down his chin, face mashed against the window.

Harry grinned and fished a long, fluffy quill from his bag.

"What are you doing?" Hermione hissed.

He raised a finger to his lips and winked.

She looked from the quill to Ron and back again, a smile rising on face against her best efforts to look stern. "Harry don't. Come on, that's mean. _Harry._"

Harry reached out and brushed the tip of the quill against Ron's nose. The red-haired boy mumbled something about frogs and bludgers, running the back of his hand over his face.

Hermione snickered and slapped a hand over her mouth guiltily, glaring at Harry accusingly. Harry had the fleeting thought of how much Crookshanks and his owner looked alike right then and there.

He flicked the quill at the end of Ron's nose again. Ron wrinkled his nose and rubbed his face against the window, his skin squeaking in the condensation. Hermione held her breath, shaking silently with laughter.

Ron settled and began to snore.

Harry flicked the quill at Ron's nose.

Smack! A large freckled hand came up and thoroughly bashed Ron in the face, knocking his head back against the window and the redhead woke with a yell. Hermione's giggles overflowed and she burst into laughter.

"Nice to have you back with us, mate," Harry said dryly.

Ron glowered at Hermione, who was still clutching her stomach and giggling. "Bloody Hell, Harry. What was that for? You're worse than Fred and George."

"I couldn't resist," he replied without remorse. "And besides, you were starting to drool."

"Was not!" Ron said, wiping furtively at his face.

The bushy-haired witch rolled her eyes and snagged the edge of Ron's robe. "Yes you did, it's all down your chin," she retorted, gesturing emphatically with the robe.

Ron said something else to her in kind, but something cold and dead had brushed over Harry's senses. Their voices faded out as he extended a tendril of magic out of the window and into the deepening twilight.

Dementors.

Oh _shit_.

They had been following the train for sometime now, judging by how many there were. But the constant fall of rain had dulled their presence to Harry's senses. "I'll be back in a minute," he said out loud to the compartment as he climbed to his feet.

Hermione frowned. "Where are you going?"

"Loo."

She blushed.

Harry grinned wryly. He'd forgotten how young she was. "Don't be embarrassed. If I disappear it's a helpful thing to know where I last was."

"You know, you could try not going missing in the first place," Ron snarked. "That'd really confuse them."

He raised an eyebrow at Ron in lieu of a response. Opening the door he glanced down the corridor both ways. "And ruin my perfect record?" he replied over his shoulder, easing out into the train's narrow walkway. Harry closed the door before Ron could reply, the dementors' looming presence urging him on.

The corridor was clearer than it had been four hours ago, most of the students having found compartments or joined-up with friends. That was good; the fewer children in the line of fire the better. And the closer he got to the end of the train, the stronger the dementors' icy, deadening power became.

_Fucking Hell! How many dementors were there?_ There couldn't have been this many present the last time around. At least sixty had surrounded the train and more waited in the background. This could turn into a massacre, a wholesale slaughter of the Hogwarts students.

'_Have I made it worse?' _Harry thought. _'Is my being here making it worse? This isn't the way it's supposed to go.'_

And maybe… maybe it was. Maybe the dementors had been attracted to him the last time around too, only this time he had more juice – and more shitty memories – which turned an alluring whisper of food to these creatures into a clarion call of feasting. And the children didn't have the mental discipline to control their emotional responses to the soul-sucking fuckers. They were being fed off of without even knowing it.

The compartment door beside him opened and out tumbled a pair of wrestling fifth years, gleefully heckling each other as they crashed into Harry.

Harry had a split second decision to make: dodge or stumble and establish himself as a clumsy, harmless teenager.

'_God, I feel like a lumbering fool.'_

He yelped as he twisted, hooking a foot under one of the other boys' shins. Harry landed on his backside and right forearm with a graceless **thud**, his head cracking against the door opposite of the one the two boys came out of. Then the compartment door behind him slid open and Harry's head hit the carpet with a _very_ unfeigned groan.

"Walk much Harry?" Oliver Wood looked much like third-year Harry remembered: stocky, muscular and suntanned – the perfect picture of the dedicated athlete.

Definitely not how he _last_ remembered him.

Harry felt like he'd swallowed razor-wire.

After Oliver left Hogwarts and went into professional Quidditch, Harry had lost track of him other than the occasional mention in the papers as England's star Keeper. Then the war worsened and Oliver disappeared. Four months later on Harry's eighteenth birthday he received a series of packages, each one containing a carefully preserved body part. He could still remember the fucking _wrapping paper_ – childish and cheesy – brightly coloured clowns on broomsticks. How bad his hands had shook – bad enough that he'd dropped the box – Wood's messy entrails spilling pinkish-grey and ropy over his bare feet. An eye, a hand, a lung, the left half of his rib cage and an organ or two; it took two weeks to fully reassemble all of Oliver Wood's jigsawed remains. By then the media had gotten hold of the story; pictures of Harry's own shocked face staring stupidly down at Wood's insides on his front doorstep splashed across every conceivable magazine written in English and even some that didn't.

Harry himself was blamed for the incident, which marked the beginning of his serious black op work for the DoM. Better to be out of the spotlight than a liability, they figured. They didn't spend time honing him into a razor-edged weapon just to discard him at the first sign of trouble – didn't exert that effort to reprogram him into a man capable of killing without emotion or remorse. Oh he'd been good at it before, but Special Forces had given him that _extra_ shine.

So if a small part of himself blamed Wood for what happened, it was to be expected, accepted and then discarded. It was only human nature.

'_What would I do without all these wonderful trips down memory lane? Jesus, this is miserable. Why did I think this was a good idea again?'_

He carefully tucked all of the trailing pieces of himself back inside where they belonged and mock-scowled at up Wood. "Laugh it up, shorty."

The other occupants in the compartment laughed, good-naturedly ribbing the Quidditch captain. "Listen to the little guy, Ollie." "Can't exactly call him little anymore." More laughter.

"Oh, so that's how it is," Oliver replied teasingly. "Well I may be short, but at least I can put one foot in front of the other without falling on my face."

Harry grinned, momentarily forgetting himself. "I didn't fall on my face, I fell on my ass. And besides, I might be a clumsy idiot, but I have my redeeming qualities."

Wood scoffed. "Oh really."

His grin turned devious. "You know what they say about men with big feet."

The compartment howled with laughter. Oliver shook his head grinning and offered Harry a hand up.

Harry grabbed it, levering himself up; he hid a smirk when Oliver's eyes widened. "Good God, Harry! The Weasley duo said you got bigger, but they didn't say how big. I thought you had put on a bit of weight around the middle, but – damn! I think you're still growing!"

"Why's everybody making such a big deal about it?" Harry said as he hunched his frame back down under Wood's eye level.

The seventh-year Gryffindor to his left tossed her head back laughing, her long golden curls catching the lamplight of the compartment and Harry felt a flare of heat and hunger stir under his skin.

She grinned up at him, summer-blue eyes shining with mirth.

Lorraine.

One of his more serious relationships, all of which he could fit on one hand and he'd still have fingers left over. She'd done a few jobs for the DoM as a Curse-Breaker and more for the Order of the Phoenix as a Ward-Warden. They had dated for about three years before she was killed in a Death Eater raid on one of the evacuation routes for the refugees. He had been twenty-four.

The dementors' creeping influence scraping across his senses snapped him back from his drift from reality.

"Potter, you were the runt of the litter," Lorraine said. "The smallest one we've seen in four years. Well, five maybe, considering some of the firsties I've seen this trip."

Harry dredged up a half-smile from the pit his thoughts had fallen into. "Not exactly something I want to be remembered for," he replied.

"Long as you're still a damn fine Seeker, I don't care what size you are. Though I think McGonagall might since she funds the Quidditch robes and supplies for Gryffindor out of her own pocket," Oliver mused to himself.

"I never knew she did that," Harry said distractedly, noting that the two boisterous fifth years had disappeared without so much as an apology. Mangy little assholes. "Hey Ollie, you have a knife I could borrow?"

Oliver peered suspiciously at him. "That depends on what you're going to use it for."

'_Killing dementors.'_ "I have to get something out of my trunk and the damn packaging isn't easy to open."

"You sure you're not going after Marks and Gordon?"

Harry turned and blinked at Wood. "Who?"

Oliver snorted and pulled from a side-sheath a blade that had to be as long as Harry's forearm.

His back hit the door-jamb and Harry raised his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Jesus, Ollie! Overcompensating for something?" he said, inserting a panicked lilt into his voice.

With a practiced twist of the wrist, Oliver casually flipped the knife end over end, handing Harry the hilt.

"Oh how very suave of you, Ollie. No really, if I was a chick, my knickers would be half-way across the room by now. Take me, you manly man you," Harry said without thinking.

Lorraine wasn't the only one laughing, but she was the one Harry noticed the most.

"Just don't go running around with it," Oliver said as Harry took the oversized blade from him.

"Don't worry, Sugar-tits. If there be any severed limbs, I promise to fully deny you and your sword's involvement," Harry replied with a lisp, patting him on the arm.

Oliver flushed red. "Get out of here you little punk!" he said laughing, unceremoniously shoving Harry out of the compartment.

Harry grinned and pretended to stumble, bouncing a little off the side of the corridor, Lorraine's voice berating Wood for being so mean to the poor third year ringing out from the compartment. He tried not to think too much about her as he tucked the knife into his sleeve, Ollie's small sword being large enough to scare people. His alarm in the compartment hadn't been entirely feigned.

Dementors were a psychic race, most operating off of a central "brain" of sorts and using telepathy to communicate with each other. Rogue dementors, however, were a pain in the ass – wild fiends that roamed without purpose and driven by hunger alone. The bright side was that rogue dementors were much less intelligent than their communal counterparts.

These were not rogue dementors.

Another thing most people didn't know was that dementors bred like rabbits. A disturbing thought to even contemplate; dementors had numbered in the tens of thousands in terms of population when Harry had died. Apparently Azkaban not only kept track of them, but it had also kept their ranks down to a reasonable size. In addition to being breeding machines, they had two hearts – one in the hollow of where the collarbone and neck conjoined and another in the centre of their sternum.

The lights flickered out and the train slowed to a stop.

Harry hit the door to the baggage car running. There was a scream from the compartment beside him, a high thin cry that was silenced almost as soon as it started.

Black fingers of hoarfrost trailed down the corridor from the baggage car, coating everything in a slick layer of ice. Frost crackled under Harry's trainers and the doorknob was so cold it felt like it was searing the skin of his fingertips. The dementors would enter via the baggage car; ice flaked off the door as he eased the frozen wood open. The car itself was stacked high with luggage, the gleam of metal hinges dulled by the layer of frost. Several of the student's pets lay dead in their carriers; owls lying stiff and unmoving at the bottom of their wire cages, feet curled to their breast, cats with their mouths frozen open in a permanent yowl, frost-blackened tongues hanging out, furry bodies stiff with cold and death. This wasn't like Mab's power – the ancient aether of Winter. The dementors were hungry and malignant and willing to destroy everything in their path just to feed.

Flashbacks tugged at Harry's mind, triggered by the sense-memory images of the dead animals and he ruthlessly slammed his Occlumency shields in place. The dementors' influence cut off with an abrupt pop of his eardrums.

He melted into the flat black shadows of a stack of trunks, crouching on top of a sturdy, brass-bound trunk made of cedar, knife held at the ready. A deep blue gloom permeated the air, settling over his skin and mind, blood flowing sluggish like cold maple syrup in his veins, breath slow as sleep.

The outside door unlocked with a sharp click and swung open. A grey, skeletal hand curled over the top of the doorjamb; long-fingered and oddly jointed, the decaying flesh looked like it could curl around in the opposite direction just as easily. The dementor pulled itself downward from the top of the doorway, its tatterdemalion robes trailing behind it like smoky octopus arms.

It sank to the floor, rising to glide noiselessly over the clutter and baggage. Another appeared behind it and another after that, wispy wraiths filling the air.

Harry's muscles bunched then released and he launched himself off the trunk with all the careless grace of a house cat jumping onto a kitchen countertop. He hit the dementor knife first, blade angled downward. Blood, rubbery and black like ink, spurted under his hands and across his face. Harry wrenched the blade from the side of the creature's neck and drove it into the dementor's second heart, located dead centre of its' pigeon-chested frame. Brittle, birdlike bone crunched and popped – screaming, there was screaming – and Harry was moving, white-hot instinct coursing through his veins. He hit the second dementor, driving the knife hard enough through its chest that two inches of steel showed on the other side. Shrill, psychic squealing pulsed inside his head and the creature's clammy hands batted feebly at Harry's face. It was silenced with a sick squish of the blade through its throat.

The third was nearly through the doorway. Harry jumped, knocking it down and drove the knife through its skull. The dementor's high, psychic cry reached supersonic levels and he twisted the knife from the creature's skull with a pained yell of his own. Warm blood trickled from his ears and nose, a film of red closing in on his vision. He felt the soft, cool slipperiness of its brains under his fingers and drove his other hand into the crack in the back of the dementor's mutilated skull. He pulled.

The screaming stopped.

He wiped his sleeve under his nose and the faded cotton came away red. Harry grimaced and dragged the dementor's corpse into the empty compartment beside him, leaving a sticky, brackish smear on the carpet. The chill malignant energy of the dementors throbbed angrily at the back of the train, but thankfully, Harry didn't sense them trying to board the Express again. He pushed his sleeves up and began weaving a dark magic spell with his fingers, hands stained to the elbows in thick inky blood. A glowing pentagram made of indigo fire hovered in mid air over the dead dementor.

Well, this would either work or not…

Harry flicked the brackish blood at the pentagram and it hissed and flared, the hungry cold of the dementors licking at his skin. Good. Part one completed.

Raising his right hand to his lips, Harry sucked the blood from his fingers as he thrust the other into the middle of the pentagram. He gagged, the taste of grave-rot and decay numbing his tongue and creeping down his throat. Harry writhed on the carpet, eyes rolled back into his head, nausea and pain warring for dominance as the dementors' psychic sledgehammer slammed into his mind. It felt like being hit with lightning.

**YOU!**

'_Me,'_ he gasped back.

**YOU KILLED OUR BRETHEREN!**

Harry felt his face transform into a mad leer, silent laughter shaking through him. Human minds weren't meant to touch this shit; he was gambling his sanity just attempting this. _'Yes, I did.'_

The dementors shrieked as one and felt his hands clawing into his scalp as he tried to escape. **WE WILL SHRED YOU! FLAY YOUR MIND AND FEAST ON YOUR SOUL!**

A thousand tiny bugs writhed under his skin, burrowing their way to his soul. He felt fingers in his throat, clawing at the soft skin of his mouth and realized they were his own. **DIE!** It felt like icy needles being driven through his brain. Harry jacknifed on the floor, convulsing violently and tasted his own blood mixed with the flavour of grave-rot.

'_No!'_ Harry struggled to his hands and knees, swallowing back the mindless terror and pressed his face into the carpet. The dementors' psychic fingers delved into his mind; bringing forth memories so strong he swore he could smell the cordite in the air. He closed his eyes gasping into the carpet as his magic sparked uselessly under his fingers. Harry reached deep into the dark wellspring of his power and scrabbled helplessly at the bottom. None of this would help him – he couldn't even form a Patronus anymore – the powerful light magic being too far out of reach with as much dark magic as he had immersed himself in. He whimpered as he felt the dementors board the train and pass by him.

Useless – he was so fucking useless.

A dementor floated into the compartment. It pulled its hood off and began manipulating Harry's body into place, almost gentle as it lowered its mouth to his, a mockery of a lover. It inhaled and he felt himself begin to fade. His frantic search for power weakened and his magic faded to faint ember in his core.

His view of the world shrank to a heavy-lidded, black-tinged cavern that seemed to swallow him whole. Powerless, helpless, useless – fuck, he couldn't even feel his body anymore – a curious not-numbness because he could certainly feel the rough carpet under him, the cold skin of the dementor and the slowing of his heart, but there was nothing else. He'd been close to death before and it wasn't anything like this. This was something else, something like non-existence, a mind permanently wiped clean. No soul, no life, no death. Nothing. A part of himself welcomed it.

A part of him didn't.

Blackness opened around him and he felt like he'd been dropped into an endless night. It was something darker than his magic, purer, older, stronger and thousand times deeper. It rose with a roar in his core, an ocean of magic in hues too dark to name, surging outwards through his blood. This was why Mab had brought him back. He understood that now.

Harry's hands clamped onto the sides of the dementor's skull and he inhaled. Life rushed back into him and awareness, too. He reached for the chill resonance of the dementors.

He attacked. _**'BEGONE! CEASE AND LEAVE!'**_

**WHY? WE WERE SENT HERE.**

His anger flared and pain echoed across the dementors' psychic connection. Harry stared at the eyeless sockets of the dementor whose skull he was slowly crushing. The words came out slow and hard, red burning in his mind. "Because if you don't, I will hunt you down and exterminate your race."

**MERCY! **they cried. **HAVE MERCY O SCION OF DARKNESS!**

'_**LEAVE!'**_ he thundered.

They did, their chill hunger slowly dissipating from his senses.

He came back to himself with the realization that he was soaked head to toe in dementor blood. Harry gagged and pushed the corpse to the side, coming to his feet with a groan. The shrivelled husks of the two dementors lay at his feet, one curled in on itself, the other with the pieces of its head strewn all the way out into the corridor. They were a sobering reminder of how close he had pushed his luck this time. He was very grateful he hadn't tried that spell before he had come back in time; the spell was only supposed to be used as a communication device, not as a weapon. If things had turned out differently…

Harry picked up Oliver's discarded knife and wiped it off on his jeans. "I am one lucky son of a bitch," he said out loud to no-one in particular. The window's reflection showed a tall pale young man with dark hair and even darker blood speckled like a heathen tattoo across his face, glinting dark and wet against the pallor of his skin.

Footsteps pounded down the corridor and Draco Malfoy's white-blonde hair appeared in the window's reflection, his features pinched and frightened. He skidded in the slick, brackish blood coating the wooden walkway of the corridor. Harry could hear the door rattle as Draco grabbed the doorframe to steady himself.

Harry leaned forward and exhaled on the window, fogging Malfoy's reflection. He could sense the faint stink of dark magic on the boy. _'Daddy's starting early this time.'_

"You killed them," Draco Malfoy stated in a wavering voice. "You killed them." His voice cracked and ended on a high note, fear coming off of him in waves.

Harry drew a smiley face in the fogged up portion of the window, cocked his head, and then gave it fangs. Behind him, Draco was starting to hyperventilate. Harry frowned and glanced over his shoulder. The younger Malfoy bore almost no resemblance to the Draco Malfoy he remembered. Wide grey eyes stared up at him, frightened and painfully young, no sign of the confident, competent man Harry knew within them. This Draco hadn't had to watch his mother die at the hands of his aunt. This Draco hadn't overcome his father's ideals. This Draco hadn't overcome _himself_.

'_Draco Malfoy, my snobbish asshole of a friend, you have a long way to go.'_

"I did, didn't I?" Harry said lightly turning back to the window, the condensation gone and reflection clear again. "Was anybody hurt?"

Draco blinked. "I… no, I don't know."

"Why don't you go find out?" Harry replied.

The boy bobbed his head and walked shakily away. Maybe Harry had already started the wheels of change and maybe, he had a better chance of reaching him as Hadrian Sharr instead of Harry Potter.

Harry sighed and dropped the knife by the curled up corpse of the dementor. Time to slide back into character. He sank to the floor curling his knees to his chest and huddled into the corner, pasting a shocked expression on his face. He began rocking minutely back and forth and by the time Oliver dashed into the compartment, Harry was the perfect example of a frightened young victim of a dementor attack.

'_I deserve an Emmy for this shit.'_


	14. White Rabbit

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**A/N:** Cheers if you can catch the Supernatural quote. Also, if you complain about the lack of canon compliance in this chapter, I ain't takin' you seriously when you've made it this far into the fic and you _haven't_ noticed that it's a bit AU…

Chapter Thirteen

White Rabbit

_/ When men on the chessboard/ Get up and tell you where to go/ and you've just had some kind of mushroom/ and your mind is moving low/ Go ask Alice/ I think she'll know /_

_-Jefferson Airplane_

_**A few weeks earlier…**_

The wedge-shaped store that sat on the corner of Vertic Alley and Rosemary's Way had been many things over the years. For the last twenty, it was a teashop and bookstore with a steadily expanding patronage. One of Diagon Alley's best kept secrets, the shop specialized in rare books, a surprisingly large selection of wizarding fiction novels, magazines, art and other odds and ends in addition to its array of exotic treats and teas. Smaller than Flourish and Blotts, the leading book distributor of the wizarding world, the four-storey affair of brown brick overlooked a small garden crowned with towering oaks and copper sculptures. On a sunny day, it was a beautiful place to sit and eat.

Today, it was raining hard enough to drive away the hardiest patrons. The teashop sat nearly empty save for a few members of the Book Brigade, a popular literary society for witches, left clustered in the teashop downstairs.

'_I usually enjoy Otis' sense of humour, but the African masks are a bit much,'_ Albus mused from his comfortable seat by the rain-slick picture window.

Otis, the owner of the teashop, had a distinct affection for the unusual. The masks themselves were carved of wood and heavily lacquered with a thick, dark gloss. Bits of yellowing bone, dried grass, fur and beaten copper plating adorned their distorted faces; they leered down their bone-pierced noses at the teashop's patrons, eyes bugging out absurdly and seemingly following people as they moved. In a flight of fancy, Otis had stuffed the hollows of the masks with fairy-lights, hard, flat reds and hard, flat yellows gleaming from yawning mouths, nostril holes, and occasionally the ears.

The effect, Albus decided as he sipped his tea, was exceptionally unnerving.

Martin Lewis, an old student of Albus' and Senior liaison for Counter Intelligence, had just cleared the third floor landing and was immediately greeted by the sight of the glowing, gaping, grotesquely misshapen features of the devil incarnate. To his credit, he didn't flinch.

"That's horrific," he said flatly, a flicker of revulsion twisting across his face.

Albus hummed a nonsensical ditty to himself. "I think they're actually quite charming, Marty. I wonder if I should get a pair for my office." Over the years Martin had acquired the stiff demeanour that working in a military division of the Department of Mysteries inevitably imparted on its' employees. Albus very much enjoyed shaking the man up when he could. Life was too short to be merely endured. That was one lesson he'd never had much luck imparting on others and sadly enough, it was one often learned in hindsight.

Martin settled with a sigh in the green striped chair. For a man who prided himself on a tidy appearance, he seemed unusually haggard, salt 'n pepper stubble over gaunt cheeks, robes in a shade of muted blue were creased along the left side like he'd spent one too many nights sleeping at his desk, hands stained with ink and white-knuckled from stress.

"My friend, you look far too overworked for your pay grade," he told the man as gently as he could without sounding condescending.

Martin scowled, true anger sparking in his expression, alarming the Headmaster more than his friend's rumpled appearance. "Don't play coy, Albus," he ground out. "You know damn well how much bending over I've had to do for you lately."

"I take it our enquiry didn't go over very well," Albus replied, bushy brows climbing his forehead. "I do hope you didn't get reprimanded on my account."

The Ministry worker exhaled heavily, running a hand through his short grey hair. "No. My apologies Albus, you didn't deserve that. The last few days have been… tumultuous. I did pursue your inquiry into the actions at Privet Drive as discretely as I could. I have to say, I don't blame you for being worried."

Albus felt a frisson of unease make its way down his spine. "You sound upset, Marty." He set the teacup on the table with an abrupt clank and peered over the rims of his glasses at the faint sheen of sweat on Martin's neck. "Are you alright?"

The man's thin fingers bent together and fluttered like the wings of a caged bird. He swallowed rapidly then straightened in his chair, resolve firming his features. "Privet Drive was but a small incident in a chaotic chain of events we pieced together by breadcrumbs of information," he paused and directed his gaze from the rain spattered windows to the Headmaster, warming to his subject. "The last thing we expected was that they were perpetrated by one of our own."

The cup shivered and rose from the table. "An agent of Voldemort?" Albus inquired as he carefully spun the willow patterned teacup in mid-air.

"No," Martin pursed his lips as he watched the cup respond to the minuscule amount of magical stimuli emitting from Albus' skin. "You remember Lord Grindelwald, yes?"

Albus glanced up at his old student, teacup lazily twirling inches from the circle of his hands. "I'm old, but I'm not _that_ old, Marty. Yes, I remember Artimis very well in fact." Age, unfortunately, had not dulled the memory for him.

"Were you aware that he had children?"

If it were possible to verbally bludgeon someone in the face with a brick – that would have done it for Albus Dumbledore. His hands closed about the delicate china before it could hit the age-worn wood of the table.

The first thought that came to mind was it was a lie. The second reminded him that Martin was not one to pass along mere gossip without wringing every shred of truth from it that he could. And yet… there were a long number of years that he'd had no contact with Artimis. It was an unsettling idea, but not impossible. Especially after the defeat of his incarnation as Lord Grindelwald, well, Artimis was little inclined to see Albus let alone speak to him. To say nothing of sharing family matters with him.

Old hopes, old fears, old regrets. The 'what ifs' and 'could haves' of the world never served anyone well at all.

Albus shook himself from the memories and responded. "How many?"

Martin raised three fingers from the table. "Artimis Sharr had three children. All born to the same mother, Bree Verall."

"I remember her. Beautiful, but equally twisted," Albus replied as he turned the cup over on the table. Bree was a full blooded dark veela and it had showed. Critics still used Bree as an icon of beauty in the wizarding world, a bit like how the Muggles regarded Marilyn Monroe or Bettie Page. _Exquisite_ was the word the Daily Prophet had used. Artimis had called her _intoxicating. _ _Cruel, dangerous_ and _indubitably warped_ was a little closer to Albus' own opinion. Memory played inside his mind on a feedback loop and Bree looked over at him again from her seat at one of the Ministry sanctioned lunches, porcelain face revealed by the oversized black sunhat, glossy blue-black hair pulled back in a dark halo around her head, mouth quirked into a sly smile, violet eyes wide, lustrous and very, _very_ insane. "Madness begets madness," he reflected. "More so, when it is augmented by love. I'm sure she helped drive Artimis fully over the edge."

"Oh no doubt of that," said Martin. "The first child was Alissé Sharr, born in 1951. When she was five, she contracted the same cholera that devastated the European communities. She survived, but not intact and after that, she had no more magic than a Muggle."

"The disease affected the children the worst." The slow simmering rage of loss and pain stirred in Albus once more. Hogwarts was nearly emptied that year; everyone had lost someone in their family. "It was almost always fatal in the young."

Marin nodded. "And on top of the previous losses during the second great war…"

"It's astounding how well the wizarding world managed to bounce back after such devastation," Albus said in agreement.

"The second child was born in 1960 and also a girl," said Martin, falling into the rhythmic cadence of one used to giving long reports to a varied audience. "She was named Lily Aideen Sharr. At the 'death' of Artimis in '62, the children were lost in the system and perhaps because of the secrecy, they were shuffled off into the Muggle Child Services."

"Then the third child couldn't have been Artimis's!" Albus said abruptly, mind racing over the horrifying possibilities of copulating with the dead. Bree was just deranged enough to do it.

Martin continued on as if Albus hadn't said anything. "The first two children were adopted by Morgan and Elizabeth Evans."

Oh no.

"And subsequently became Petunia and Lily Evans," said Martin, unrelenting in his narrative. "The first married a Muggle and hasn't been heard from since the death of the Evans and Lily married James Potter – the rest, as they say, is old news."

Albus felt frozen to the chair, back ramrod straight. "That would make…" He couldn't bring himself to finish the thought.

Martin seemed to sense this. "Harry Potter the heir to a very dark legacy?" he said quietly.

Darkness had always been present in Harry's magical aura, but now it held a different connotation than simply being the lingering remnants of Voldemort's folly. It was not that Albus _doubted _Harry's loyalty. No, not ever – Harry gave his loyalty because he wanted to, not because it was required. It was an honour to have his loyalty and Albus understood that where Harry was concerned. No, the problem was one of influence. Which was worse – the leftover bits of magic Voldemort imparted upon Harry or the raw, natural darkness inherent in him?

There were precious few options left for a child with an inclination towards the darker aspects of magic. _'He will be fighting an uphill battle for the rest of his life.'_

"What of the third child?" Albus inquired.

"The third child was born on November 16, 1965. A boy named Hadrian Sharr who according to Blackwood is not only the real deal," said Martin as he leaned back in his chair, content in drawing out the suspense of the moment. "But has also been in the employ of the DoM since 1982. He is one of the highest ranking black operatives of Special Forces, a combat group used mainly for assassination and extraction missions."

Albus frowned, not liking where this information was leading. "There was never a Hogwarts letter for him."

"Which is part of the reason we haven't heard of him until now. No paper trails, school records or anything of the like," said Martin, gaze direct and revealing nothing. It lent an impersonal feel to the conversation and that in itself let Albus know how classified this information truly was.

"That should be impossible," Albus said with dry amusement, appreciating the irony in the statement. "1965 – I was sure that Artimis passed away in '62… Or were we all fooled about that as well?"

"He _was_ a slippery son-of-a-bitch. I wouldn't be surprised if he managed to hang in there for another ten years. Although with the wound that you dealt him…"

Albus shook his head. "It was fatal, Marty. He's dead now. I'm sure of that," he murmured softly. He pushed the cup and saucer to the side and folded his hands on the table. "What of the mother?"

Martin was gracious enough to take the hint. "She disappeared," he announced, flicking his wand at his own teacup and the smell of lemon and Earl Grey wafted through the air. "From the information provided, we can assume the boy lived with her for the first ten years of his life."

Albus raised a brow at that. "Oh dear. I don't remember Bree to be a shining example of impending motherhood."

"Certainly not if Sharr is what became of her parenting skills," Martin replied acerbically. "We know that at some point he started making regular contact with his sister Lily – which leads me to believe that the children weren't as lost as we'd like to think."

"But no attempt at communication was made between Bree and the other children?" The thought of Bree infecting her other children with the selfsame psychosis left Albus feeling cold.

"As far as we know, no," said Martin blithely as he carefully blew steam off his tea.

He exhaled slowly. "I suppose I should be grateful for that," Albus said as he met Martin's knowing gaze.

The other man tapped a finger on the table, gesturing as if he had a report under his fingertip. Habits of a lifetime were hard to break. "Blackwood also says that Sharr claims the night the Dark Lord fell to have been a joint effort between him and his sister."

Albus inhaled sharply, blindsided yet again by Martin's words. He brought his folded fingers close to his mouth as if he could stop the press of questions that tugged insistently on his tongue.

Together? Maybe, and maybe not. The options were endless. Lily had been an incredibly gifted, incredibly clever witch, far-seeing and deep-thinking and had she lived on, she would have become a true artist of magic. That she had a brother, just as talented as herself, opened up a range of possibilities that Albus had never considered.

"Did Blackwood say anything more of how this was accomplished?" he inquired thoughtfully.

Martin gave a soft huff of laughter, tilting his head down and away from Albus. "As per usual, no, he did not." He glanced back up at Albus, face wry and regretful. "The details of that night _are_ fairly vague."

And Albus had taken great caution to ensure that; Hagrid himself had volunteered to be put under a geas not to talk about the night Voldemort fell. A fine idea given his propensity for drink and talk. "Why didn't Hadrian take young Harry with him? If he was in regular contact with Lily then surely he would have encountered her son." Unless she had deemed her brother too dangerous to meet the child.

"Albus, at fifteen would you have voluntarily taken on the responsibility of caring for a baby?" Martin intoned sardonically.

"Different times, Marty." Fifteen was a very long time ago.

The difference between Muggles and Wizards had not been so stark a divide. The Muggles were far enough behind, technologically speaking, as to not be a threat to their wizarding counterparts. But there were those that liked to say that the fields were greener then, as if the spaces between mankind and the issues of race were larger. As if it was all just an era born of loose nostalgia and a wilfully blind stupidity; they passed that logic down to their children as if the ridiculous notion of people hating each other out of habit was something golden and good. The truth of the matter was that the fields were not greener, just people's memories and those, like pictures, would eventually fade. But anger, though, anger lasted forever. As did death. _'In the end, we all bleed red and the differences between magical and non-magical are reduced to simply who dies first.'_

Martin nodded as if he could hear the unspoken words. "True. But in all actuality I can't tell you why he didn't take his nephew with him," he said, his manner direct and unflinching. "Blackwood was surprisingly reticent about telling me what became of Harry Potter. I honestly don't know what Sharr's motives were. Or are, for that matter. But it's no secret that he hates Death Eaters."

Faint amusement tickled Albus' mind. "I can imagine that he would. His father had little respect for people like that either." Sycophantic agents of chaos, Artimis had called them, truly appalled at anyone who would voluntarily submit themselves to another man's will. He had often referred to their kind as the 'yes-men of dark magic'. That one had to surround themselves with slavish regard reflected poorly upon their control over their own mind and magic. It was one thing to be a soldier for a cause; it was another to become a slave. The fact that Voldemort had chosen Grindelwald as his icon of the embodiment of a dark lord showed his total ignorance in the man. On his darker days, it gave Albus unending delight and laughter. "Where did Blackwood hear this information?"

"When Hadrian Sharr's name came to his attention he promptly requested a debriefing with Sharr and his handler." Martin leaned closer, an eager gleam flaring to life in his eyes. "And this you might find interesting. His handler is a man named Archimedes Shorner."

An incredulous expression crept across Albus' face. Not exactly Kosher but who was he to point fingers? "The Head of Research and Experimental magic?" A genius in every sense of the word, Archimedes Shorner had attended Hogwarts as a Ravenclaw for two years before family troubles pulled him away. Shorner had finished his schooling at Salem Academy of Magic in the States; upon completing his education, he was immediately offered a job with the American division of Analysis and Tactical Specialists. Four years as an agent profiler and then he transferred over to British Experimental Magics where he had climbed to his current position. "Sounds like he has friends in fairly high places."

"Quite literally," said Martin, a smug note entering his voice. "From what Blackwood tells me, Hadrian Sharr and Shorner are old friends of sorts. Shorner mentored the Sharr progeny when he first went into Special Forces."

"Prime material for a lengthy working relationship. Was he the one who recruited Hadrian?" Albus inquired. The idea of Sharr and Shorner working together fascinated him almost as much as it appalled him. Genius, creativity and madness was a more potent potion than he liked to tangle with. Artimis had taught him that much.

Martin's lips thinned. "No, that was actually Pryce's doing." He said the name as if invoking it would cause him to be tarred with the same ash and blood as The Butcher had been in his heyday.

Albus was impressed despite himself. "Handpicked by the Devil himself."

"Indeed," said Martin, tone flat and dry.

Albus cagily tiptoed over his own discomfort with the topic. "He passed a few months back, didn't he?"

Martin chuckled, lip curling into a sneer. "God rest his soul in the deepest depths of Hell."

Pryce may have been a murderer and psychopath, but he had ruled as king over his athelings in Special Forces despite Blackwood's bid for power. Blackwood was woefully unprepared for when his more dubious operatives started bucking at the reins. "If Pryce is dead, then that raises a sticky question. Where is Hadrian receiving his orders?"

The Ministry worker didn't answer for a few moments as he bent over his teacup. "Truthfully I don't know," Martin said quietly. "Sharr doesn't appear to be part of any chain of command which is worrisome in and of itself."

Albus tilted his head in question. "And Blackwood is aware of this?" he inquired, knowing in his gut just how little control Blackwood held over his operatives.

"Very much so. But there's not much he can do about it," said Martin, the lines deepening in his face as continued. "Paperwork is all nice, neat and legal. Sharr is currently finishing up the last of Pryce's orders."

Albus picked up his teacup once again and studied the way the light shone through the fine porcelain. He gently placed it back on the table in front of him, turning it until the delicately formed handle lay in the same position as the Sharr name lay on the twelve-pointed star of the Families. The Seventh House of the Lords of Magic. Good God. "Do we know what they are?"

Martin snorted. "Not a damn clue. I can tell you though that he did have an altercation with another Special Forces team a few weeks back."

Albus glanced up from his contemplation of the imaginary star his mind had placed on the table. "A training exercise?"

This time Martin laughed out loud, an uncharacteristically harsh, strident sound that bounced off the walls of the otherwise empty tearoom. "Not unless training manoeuvres consist of Blackwood's second-in-command in the assisted living ward of St. Mungo's and everyone else in body-bags."

"Was there any reason for this?" Albus asked, bewildered and struggling to understand the reasoning behind such senseless violence. "A rivalry perhaps?"

"Most likely not. Blackwood may have given the go ahead for the mission to proceed forth, but I doubt he knew what he was getting himself into," Martin replied candidly.

Albus frowned, feeling uncomfortably like he had more than thirty years ago when the war with Voldemort was first beginning to stir. "That doesn't sound like him; Blackwood," _May be an arrogant braggart – _"is not the sort of man who blithely makes a move without first knowing where he's going to step."

"I agree," Martin nodded his head as he crossed his arms and sat back in his chair. "But Sharr's got him running scared and people do strange things when they panic. To Blackwood, Sharr is this loose cannon with no cause for loyalty to the current administration. And trying to control a Sharr Lord is like putting a dog leash on a Great White."

"Why would Hadrian have him scared? Beyond the usual chaos, of course?" As if a Sharr Lord could be considered 'usual chaos'. _'You know you're getting old when…'_

Martin licked his lips and tapped the table once more. "Counter Intelligence helped put together a report placing Sharr in the same vicinity as La Muerte when he was taken out. The Brazilian magical government identified a magical signature that didn't fit with the necromancer or his known associates and were quite happy to send us a copy when we asked. After a little legwork, Analysis and Tactical Specialists were able to pin the signature to Hadrian Sharr. Blackwood was very… _impressed_ by the level of violence used to execute the necromancer."

Albus looked over the rims of his glasses at the Ministry worker. "Level of violence? I'm sensing a pattern here."

Martin coughed on his next swallow of tea. "Brazil had a hard time identifying La Muerte mostly because there wasn't much there to identify."

Albus inhaled sharply. "Good heavens. Even Artimis was leery of angering La Muerte."

"With good reason," Martin replied grimly. "Brazil dragged the river by the compound and found the messy remains of some of La Muerte's more unusual projects. Sharr did one hell of a clean-up job."

"And Blackwood was worried about this?" said Albus disbelievingly. "I would think that he would be pleased to have Hadrian in his employ with such effective results."

"Blackwood didn't know at the time that Sharr was one of us. All he had to go on was the smouldering remnants of La Muerte's compound, Sharr's name and evidence that everyone in the compound had been efficiently terminated by someone with a keen sense of military procedure." Martin spread his hands helplessly. "Blackwood probably wouldn't have panicked the way he did if all signs hadn't pointed to a rogue dark wizard coming after England next."

"I don't think the secrecy worked well in Hadrian's favour this time," Albus intoned with dry humour.

Martin's answering smile was thin and flat. "Especially not when we managed to tie him to the same area as Harry Potter's neighbourhood when the conflict with the other special ops team went down."

The alarm, which had been growing in Albus' mind, soared to a crescendo. "What was he doing there?"

He shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe he just wanted to check up on the lad," said Martin.

The blood wards on Number Four never registered an intruder in the house. Albus hadn't considered the possibilities of another relation entering the home. Blood wards were an ancient and powerful means of protection and as dubious a magic as they were, they had been necessary. The first four years after Voldemort's fall were marred by a very subtle, bloody undercover round-up of the remaining Death Eaters. More than once, retribution was sought upon young Harry and it was only by the bulwark of the blood wards that he was still alive. "Blackwood didn't know why he was at Harry's home?"

Martin frowned, features growing pensive. "If he did, he wasn't sharing it."

Harry had been missing from Privet Drive for quite awhile by now and the wards had fallen almost as soon as he'd disappeared. The idea of Harry in the company of his mother's brother was like a poisonous thorn in Albus' thoughts. Hadrian was a man whose sanity seemed a questionable thing making his intentions towards his nephew all the more undecipherable; Harry would be vulnerable to his uncle's dark influence simply because of how much he craved family. It was an unsettling notion that a Sharr Lord was able to walk right into what Albus considered a secure location. "Should I be worried if Hadrian has made contact with Harry?"

"If I felt as responsible for the child as you do – yes, unconditionally yes. But consider this Albus," Martin replied.

"Not only do you have no children," said Albus, mildly amused by the direction the conversation was headed. "With three marriages and counting, the alimony would be crippling."

"And thank God for that," the man replied, unfazed by Albus' joke. "Remember that Harry Potter has a large part of the Sharr legacy running through his veins." Martin paused as if contemplating something that just recently occurred to him. "In fact, he is _the_ Heir of the Sharr Family, being Hadrian Sharr's last link to his sister. He might even be trying to groom the boy into someone befitting his birthright if Sharr has no plans to beget children himself."

Albus sighed and sat back in his chair, rubbing at his forehead. It was of little use; worry had already inundated itself upon him and was making its distress known. "To the best of your knowledge, how widely known is this information?"

"Sharr has no reason to spread this about and he has proven himself tight-lipped about his personal information – as evidenced by our total lack of knowledge about him. Shorner is no more likely to say anything than Sharr is because of how close he is to him. It would not be in his best interests."

Albus raised a brow over Martin's choice of words. "You think Hadrian is working a few jobs on the side for Shorner?" It didn't fit with what he'd heard of the man, but power did funny things to people. Shorner was the one person who would be in a position to wield a measure of control over Hadrian's actions.

"I don't see why he would. Shorner comes from old money on both Muggle and magical sides of his family," said Martin, hedging around the subject.

"But…" replied Albus.

Martin drummed his fingers on the table. "But… I think at this point… anything is possible. I am unsure about everything that involves Sharr Lords right now."

"And of Blackwood?" Albus inquired.

The Ministry worker gave him a sideways look. "You and I both know how close the ties between Lucius Malfoy and Blackwood are – you can be sure that all of the high-ranking Death Eaters know this by now. Blackwood only told me because he believes me to be fully pinned under his thumb."

"And yet he unknowingly tipped his hand in our favour," said Albus, appreciative of the irony inherent in Blackwood's actions. "Are you the only source of this information? I don't want to endanger you."

Martin spread his hands in question. "That would depend on how much control Lucius has over the remaining Death Eaters. Whatever you decide to do, Albus, be discreet. It's not just my job at stake here."

Albus nodded in agreement. "One more thing, Marty. I hate to push you on this but I desperately need to know."

"Ask away," Martin replied, looking much more at ease now that he'd relieved himself from the burden of his discoveries.

"Bertha Jorkins disappeared last week on a mission for me in Eastern Europe. She was searching for an artefact of the Old World, something rumoured to have belonged to the Sharr Family before it was lost over two-hundred years ago. I'm afraid she hasn't been seen or heard from since," said Albus, the image of a jagged shard of violet crystal as thin as a needle churning in his head. "Do you think it could possibly be the work of Hadrian Sharr?"

Martin raised an eyebrow at Albus' vague question. "That would depend entirely on what she was looking for."

Albus hummed thoughtfully. "The more answers we get, the more questions that are raised."

"I wish I could tell you more, Albus. But with the way Blackwood has me boxed in, I don't have the security clearance to push any further. All I have to go on are rumours and vague assumptions." The Ministry worker tilted his head to the side, the lines about his eyes drawn tight and serious. "You know how people like Sharr are – like smoke on a foggy day."

"Yes, very much so." A smile worked its way across Albus' face. "His father had the same _talent_, shall we say, for sowing absolute chaos and promptly vanishing afterwards," he replied.

Martin went still. Not a shocked sort of stillness, but a rather a quiet, thoughtful stillness. He pursed his lips and scowled as he worked through whatever was troubling him.

Albus waited, patience being an old friend and constant companion.

"Forgive me," Martin said finally. "If I'm dredging up things better left alone, but, how did you know Artimis Sharr?"

"The man who would become Lord Grindelwald?" Albus replied without rancour. It was a question that few dared to ask; in his greatest intentions, Albus had never meant to cast those events under a veil of secrecy, but few had approved of his close association with such an iniquitous figure like Grindelwald.

The ministry worker nodded. "I never understood why he would… give up a life of such privilege for the face of an anonymous villain."

"Power, perhaps? Not physical or magical but more of the metaphorical, I believe. You must understand, Marty, that Artimis never expected to become the Lord of House Sharr," said Albus.

"Never? Why not?" Martin asked frowning.

"Competition. His older sister was slotted for the role long before he was born." It was time, Albus decided, too stop flinching away from the past. Hadrian wouldn't be such a surprise if everyone wasn't so eager to pretend that nothing had happened all those years ago with the Sharr Family. _Voldemort_ wouldn't have been such a surprise if his predecessor hadn't been buried in history and blithely ignored. "Amongst the Families, should more than one child be born into a generation… well, cut-throat politics are no strangers even at a young age," said Albus. Despite his Muggle origins, Darwin had aptly summed up the Families – and subsequently, pureblooded culture at the time – with a single decisive statement: natural selection. "It is the survival of the fittest at its best and worst."

Martin looked horror-struck. "That's _appalling_!" he breathed.

Albus spread his hands, palms turned upwards in a gesture of helplessness. "That is what shaped most of Artimis's childhood."

"Not exactly the lap of luxury we all believed it to be," Martin murmured low and sardonic.

"Oh it was understatedly luxurious," said Albus. "But it was less of a gilded cage and more of an opulent coliseum for the proper metaphor. Artimis was canny enough to avoid his sister Victoria's early machinations."

Martin folded his hands together in his lap and relaxed against the chair. "I cannot begin to imagine what it was like to grow up thinking that such kin-stife was commonplace."

"You shouldn't pity him, Marty. By the time Artimis was 4, the First World War had already ended and another was in the making. War is what shaped his childhood and war is what he inherited." _'And by proxy, war is what Harry has inherited as well.'_

The Ministry worker straightened in his chair. "I see. Tell me of Victoria; she doesn't seem to be a known factor here despite her, ah…" Martin trailed off.

"Despite her being Lady Sharr? A veritable princess of magic?" Albus chuckled to himself. "Victoria Sharr is an untold chapter in the Sharr Family mostly because Artimis survived where she didn't – despite her better efforts."

Martin's brows rose. "They knowingly practice this … _culling_ of their own family?"

Culling was an apt name for it. "Within the last one-hundred years, the wizarding world's population has become severely depleted from war, famine, and sickness. We used to have over 200 students in each house. Now, we are lucky to have 50. Hogwarts has adjusted herself according to our needs, but there are wide expanses of the castle that go largely unused.

Albus paused, gathering the courage to speak of events that never should have become secret in the first place. "Artimis was my godson." Martin went as still as stone and paled around wide, shocked eyes. Albus continued, knowing that if he stopped now, it would never be told. "As well as my responsibility. I will forever regret the loss of communication between us that led to his immurement in chaos and madness."

"How…" saidMartin, his voice faint and strained.

"Not as lily-white as you thought I was, aye, Marty?" Albus smiled. "No, I knew his mother. A plain vanilla Muggleborn named Madeline Barton. That's not to say she wasn't beautiful or exceptional – it's in the Sharr blood to be attracted to such qualities – but she wasn't extraordinary by means outside of her own making."

Martin recovered some of his colour. "Was she a student of yours?"

"Quite the opposite," Albus replied, settling into his story. "She was an esteemed and honoured colleague of mine in the Arts of Alchemy as well as a close friend and confidant. Many improvements in modern Alchemy can be contributed to her and inadvertently to the influences of Muggle sciences."

This startled Martin into laughter. "Alchemy being a practice touted as the purest of magical sciences."

"An entertaining bit of irony, indeed. Artimis's father, Devon, was mostly preoccupied with Victoria and the raising of Artimis fell to his mother and I. Devon didn't disapprove of my influence in the boy because of my then reputation as a scholar and fair mediator." Albus was more than aware of the incongruity of his current status as a powerful wizard of Light magic. The humour was not lost on him.

"He was grooming the boy to become a politician," said Martin. Surprise showed on the Ministry worker's features and Albus knew the other man was contemplating the numerous possibilities of what could have been; had Artimis become what his father meant him to be.

Albus nodded. "Yes and his sister into someone befitting the Head of House Sharr. But psychosis runs strong in the Family and with the passing of Madeline when Artimis was nine; Devon lost all control over Victoria."

The lines of Martin's face drew downwards. "Victoria went insane?"

Albus ruminated over the question in his mind before answering. "I believe she was always that way. Her mother's death was simply the turning point."

"Why her mother's death? From what you've told me, it sounds like they weren't very close," Martin inquired.

"They weren't. In fact, Madeline saw very little of her oldest." Hazy memories and half-forgotten details were rapidly being drawn back into stark recollection. "Some theories hold that the prodigious talents in mind magics, which run heavily in the Sharr Family, have caused them to be more susceptible to mental stress and thus insanity."

Martin looked sceptical. "Mind magics?"

"Occlumency, Legilimency, Hypnosis, Telekinesis, Precognition – And those are just a few of the documented cases of mental abilities in the Sharr Family."

The Ministry worker raised an eyebrow. "Potent abilities in and of themselves. You believe them to blame for Victoria's insanity?"

Albus shook his head. "Imagine those talents combined with a propensity for violence and a gift for Dark magic that supersedes everything you could possibly imagine and you might have a clearer idea of what Victoria was becoming. By that time, other factors had pulled me away from the Family; things… that at the time had seemed so important, yet in retrospect, didn't come to much at all.

"Could I have made a difference in Victoria?" said Albus, contemplating all possible outcomes once more and arriving at the same conclusion he had many years ago. "My instincts tell me no. Victoria was so… _trapped_ by the very gifts bestowed upon her at birth that her grasp on reality was tenuous at best. She saw herself as this dark goddess of magic and Devon, that poor man, he was woefully ineffective as a father – let alone someone capable of saving Victoria from herself."

Martin dipped his head in agreement. "How did Artimis react to his sister's insanity?"

"Artimis understood at a very early age that Devon Sharr was an ordinary wizard in a family filled with extraordinary people. Devon, due to his father's well-publicized eccentricities," said Albus.

"Timonzel's trip through the Veil," Martin filled in.

Albus felt a ghost of a smile flicker across his face at how easily Martin had slipped back into the role of a student. "Yes, and because of that, Devon became obsessed with being normal. Average, in other words, with no cause for abnormality or odd behaviours. _His_ father was an embarrassment to him, you see. And Victoria who was so much like her grandfather, bewildered Devon. Artimis understood this. So he left at the age of ten."

The Ministry worker frowned. "He ran away? Or did Devon send him away?"

Things at the time had been so strange; between the tumultuous changes in the Ministry and Victoria's rapid loss of control, Artimis had been lost in the chaos. One day he was there, and the next, he wasn't. "I don't know," Albus admitted. "That was not a period of his life he liked talking about. He simply disappeared after he left home, and didn't turn up again until two years later on the doorstep of his great-uncle in the Carpathian Mountains."

"Good God," said Martin. "Another long lost sibling?"

"Not as much as you might think," Albus replied. "Cassius Sharr was Timonzel's twin brother and he left the family not long after Timonzel's death in 1901. Washed his hands clean of the Sharr name."

Martin leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. "Until Artimis came along."

Albus nodded.

The other man drummed the fingers of his left hand against the crook of his arm before replying. "Did he ever tell you about the two years he went missing?"

Albus shook his head. "No, and like as not, I wasn't one to push. By the time we knew he was missing, it was too late to track him down. Artimis had vanished." Albus had followed every potential lead he could find, but it was too little, too late. By the middle of the second year of Artimis's disappearance, he no longer possesed the time or resources to continue tracking him. When his godson turned up in Frumoasa, Albus had pushed for Artimis to live with him, but Cassius held the claim of blood _and_ family so the boy remained with him.

"Albus?"

He glanced up into Martin's worried face. "Cassius was… _strange_. Even for a Sharr." The rumours surrounding the man held strange tales of his conquests. Apparently his taste in sexual partners ran toward the extremely deviant and extremely young. "I sometimes wonder if he did more harm than good for Artimis."

Albus waved off Martin's questioning look and continued. "Artimis lived with Cassius until 1933 when he turned 19. He disappeared again after that, turning up once more in Berlin in 1935 and a small town in northern France in 1936. In late March of 1937, he came to see me at Hogwarts."

"He must have been about 24," Martin murmured. "That's terribly young."

"Artimis _was_ young when he fashioned himself into Lord Grindelwald." His youth hadn't affected his charisma in the slightest; people flocked to him in the _thousands_ just to hear him speak. "He visited me every weekend without fail over the next three months then vanished again on the 16th of August. That was the last time I saw him as Artimis Sharr. The next time he showed up it was April 9th of 1938 and his début appearance as Lord Grindelwald."

Martin frowned deeply. "Did he…?" he trailed off.

Albus understood immediately. "Ever show signs of madness before that?" He shook his head. "No. In the end, we were all blindsided. No one saw it coming. It's hard to believe sometimes; how much someone could change in that short a period of time. I might be deluding myself, but I often wonder if perhaps he tangled with something stronger than himself and didn't quite come out whole on the other side."

"You believe the change in him came from external sources," Martin stated.

Albus dipped his head in agreement. "A catalyst, yes."

"Bree, perhaps?" the ministry worker inquired. "I know she married him in 1939. Or was it Victoria that set him off?"

Albus couldn't contain his laughter. "A man will always try to blame his troubles on a woman." He chuckled and smoothed his beard away from the table. "No Marty, I honestly do not know," he murmured, turning serious. "By 1938, Devon was four years dead courtesy of Victoria and Victoria was dead courtesy of Aubrey Remington."

His former student was silent.

The encroaching hush was broken by the chiming of Martin's pocket watch. "My, what tangled webs we weave," he said glancing at the silver-gilt instrument. "Thank you, Albus, for joining me for lunch. I'm sorry I don't have better news for you."

The two of them stood and the Headmaster began to dismantle the wards surrounding them under them pretence of waving away off the apology. "Despite the common misconception, ignorance is _not_ actually bliss."

Indeed it wasn't. If his suspicions were correct, then Harry needed to be found as soon as possible. It was in his failure as a godfather that Artimis had turned into a monster incapable of rational reasoning and emotion. And it was in his failure as a teacher that he had not sensed Tom Riddle's change from ambitious schoolboy into a budding Dark Lord. A different flavour of failure, but failure nonetheless. Albus could not afford to repeat those same mistakes with Harry.

Martin smiled. "Good day Albus. I wish you luck in your preparations for the school year."

He reached the stairs before Albus finally voiced the question that had bothered him all throughout the conversation.

"Do you know of Hadrian's whereabouts?"

The ministry worker paused and turned. He raised an eyebrow and smiled. "I think at this moment," he said, amusement colouring his words. "Only Sharr himself could tell you that."

Albus nodded and watched as his former student disappeared down the stairs. He vanished his teacup, breaking the anchor to the wards and prepared to Disapparate from the teashop.

None of this should have been a surprise. Not Artimis's children. Not Lily's heritage. And definitely not her brother. Things were stirring, events coming together, and it seemed some subtle unseen wheel had started to turn. It gained momentum now, churning, charging along, picking up speed at a rate that made the last war seem like child's play. It had begun with the emergence from the Veil. It carried on into the total annihilation of La Muerte and like clockwork; it wound down into Harry's disappearance from Privet Drive. There was a faint, niggling thought at the back of Albus' mind that time was running out and it fed off his fear with a sort of subsurface violence that reminded him of a shark lurking in deep blue waters.

One thing was for certain:

For all intents and purposes, Harry had a guardian angel of dubious quality.

And his name was Hadrian Sharr.


	15. Toccata and Fugue

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Fourteen

Toccata and Fugue

_The dream's soundtrack is a 1930s big band number. A waltzy number, in fact. Something like Lawrence Welk or Vaughn Monroe. Something bright and cheery; a chipper, foot-tapping piece and it don't exactly mesh with what he actually sees._

_Know what I mean, jellybean?_

_Because this isn't the usual nightmare, the dreams where he's pounding on the proverbial glass and all he can do is watch. No, this is a living, breathing anti-fantasy, a Hell-vision in real-time. This is his brain committing murder-suicide starring his sanity as the victim and his psyche as the perpetrator. _

_This isn't a room he's seen before. It's a big, round room – huge, actually. It's dark, too, and the only light in the room is coming from a large spotlight projected at the floor. The light paints the air with a faint, pearly luminescence, sort of like an early morning fog on a rainy day._

_Which is weird, now that he looks at it. The whole floor is one big mirror, neither concave or convex. And that's just stupid, because who puts mirror on their goddamned floor? The room is tinged the same sort of surreal quality as M.C. Escher's works of never-ending staircases, dead ends without doors, and eyes that stare out from nowhere at all._

_And all this jawing about his surroundings is only putting off the inevitable. Because the real star of this nightmare…_

…_is himself._

_Harry peers at the ceiling and a glob of hot blood smacks down on his forehead, right between his eyes. It dribbles down his cheek, warm and slick, following the tear-trail and for a moment, he thinks the ceiling is bleeding. It wouldn't be too far from the truth. He wipes the blood away and experiences a moment of vertigo – not the spine-tingling, stomach-lurching sort of dizziness, but the Oh-My-Fucking-God! I'm-Free-Falling-Without-A-Parachute! sort of vertigo. _

_That's himself pinned to the ceiling. Actually, crucified would be a better word for it because that's what they did. This anonymous "They" or "Them" or whoever had driven railroad spikes through his wrists and ankles in a spread-eagled pose of agony. Under the blood that's spattered everywhere like four-dimensional Pollok painting, the doppelganger is barefoot, dressed in expensive black linen slacks and a black button-down made of Acromantula silk. It's one of those berjillion Galleon options that the rich and insanely famous (or insanely delusional, Harry's not judging) are partial to._

_It's a silly thing to notice, but it's better than watching his dying double bleed out in a fascinating stunt of anti-gravity. Blood runs in thick, viscous channels along the cracks in the ceiling's flagstones. He knows any moment now he's going to look down and find the same red lines drawn into his skin, hot blood welling up and kissing the tattered cotton of his jeans and t-shirt. He can already feel the phantom sting of open wounds meeting the chill in the air._

"_You sad, sorry bastard." The voice is a strong, drawling tenor and it's as familiar as Harry's own. It's also a voice that makes him want to punch the owner, but he knows that won't do much good considering the man in question. _

_Draco Malfoy looks good, for all that Harry is fairly sure he's dead. The mottled purple and black ligature marks around his neck are partially hidden by the strange shadows cast by the mirror, but Harry knows they're there. It's something almost like instinct. The blond is tall and lean with shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and in the fever-bright shine of his eyes. He reminds Harry of a knife's blade – too sharp and too thin, and full of edgy, dangerous potential. _

_He's wearing white, bright and snowy. The suit is a fitted, well-tailored piece and Harry can pick out a faint pinstripe of silver running through the fabric. Against this, the snowfield expanse of the waistcoat seems to glow and the dove-grey of his shirt is a pleasing accent to the pinstripe. White, high-button spats adorn his feet over polished opalescent dragonhide shoes. The result is one of high-couture wizarding-wear pleasantly melded to Muggle formal clothing; it adds a sort of cross-culture nobility to the whole creation. Raffish and regal, it's the epitome of Draco Malfoy and simultaneously, a world away from the subdued, understated preferences of pureblood culture._

_The scar marring his upper lip twists as Draco smirks at Harry's double on the ceiling. It's a sneering sliver of a smile that looks decidedly unhinged. "Well look at you. Pinned like an unfortunate bug in some curious scientist's collection. A little elaborate for a simple dissection, don't you think?" He laughs at his own joke. "I'd act a bit more sympathetic if I didn't feel like doing that to you myself on occasion."_

_Malfoy's presence never fails to irritate the fuck out of Harry and for moment he wants to claw the asshole's eyes out so badly he tastes iron in his mouth. "Draco!" Harry simpers in his best imitation of Pansy Parkinson. "Fabulous to see you! How have you been? Be honest."_

_And the fucker continues on as if he hasn't heard a word Harry's said. "Of course, that's _usually_ after you've done something stupid like taking on two dozen Death Eaters when you're fatigued and injured."_

"_I take it you're still pissed off that I got myself killed," Harry replies and he knows he's grinning like a loon. "That's totally a reasonable thing to be angry about."_

_There's no trace of a smile on Draco's face now. If anything he seems frustrated. "Unlike you, Harry," he says, quiet and intense. "I don't have the luxury of moving on and conveniently forgetting about everything else I left behind."_

_Harry stares the blond down, eyes flat and narrow. True anger is beginning to stir in him now; it frightens him how close he's been lately to losing control and he wonders if the anger isn't a warning sign for something bigger. Voldemort? No, he dismisses that one immediately. There's no way Riddle would be able to get into Harry's mind without doing himself grievous harm. Madness? Maybe. It feels closer to the truth than he wants to admit. He clenches his jaw, willing the red tinge of fury to fade from his sight. "What do you mean by that?" _

_Draco sneers, wrath and contempt writ in the aggression of his stance. "Did you really think there was anything left for us after you died?" _

_Something in his voice cracks the veneer of Harry's anger and lands a direct hit on the raw places exposed underneath. 'You shouldn't have that kind of expectation of me in the first place,' he wants to spit back in reply. 'It's your mess - you can fucking well fix it yourself.' The words want out and Harry bites his tongue hard not to let _that_ bitter, black venom out. _

_Because that's the heart of his issues, you see, 'cause it's not like he's ever fit into the wizarding world before. He's lived in it for seventeen years now and Harry still feels like an outsider. _

_So why should he have to fix their problems? Seems a little presumptuous to him._

_Of course that doesn't stop Draco from carrying on like he's the most important person in the world. Harry sometimes wonders if Draco and Draco's overblown ego ever feel jealous of one another. "I mean," the blond says as he laughs mockingly. "Did you _really_ delude yourself into thinking that there was what, hope?" _

_"That's low. Even for you." Trust Draco Malfoy to be the one person who knows Harry well enough to hurt him where it really counts. _

_"Is it?" Draco replies. "Harry, you... are someone I greatly respect and you know I don't say that lightly. It's just... you make these incredibly _rash_ decisions and in the end, they fuck us all over. You have too much riding on your shoulders to be so cavalier about the way you do things."_

_Harry wants question where Draco gets off thinking that he's been careless with the lives entrusted to his care and where the hell did he get such a stupid notion like that anyway, but what emerges is:_

_"Why am I here?"_

_And Harry is nearly bowled over by the sense-memory of the whole thing. He's been here before. With Dumbledore and the ruins of Hogwarts, the crazy old man and his ramblings of perception and reality. _

_Draco opens his mouth to speak and Harry holds up a hand to stop him. "No, wait. Stop for a moment. I know why I'm here."_

_This place was supposedly a world of perceptions, a place not grounded in reality, a place not grounded in time either. His mind shies away from the implications. "What do I see?" he murmurs to himself. Harry glances at the strangulation marks on Draco's neck and up at his double pinned to the ceiling. "I see dead people," Harry says flatly, totally unamused by the obvious joke. "Ha fucking ha, old man."_

_"You really are slow, aren't you?" Draco says loftily._

_"Go fuck a duck, Malfoy,"Harry growls. _

_Draco rolls his eyes and sighs dramatically. "You're being totally unreasonable about this."_

_'Your pot is as black as my kettle, Asshole,' Harry thinks. But instead of saying anything, Harry turns and walks away from the blonde. He might not be able to wake up, but damned if he's going to stick around for this bullshit._

_Harry glances back over his shoulder at Malfoy. He's gone, fog drifting lazily through the empty spotlight. The feeling of being alone is almost worst than hearing his faults laid out on a platter. This is the alone feeling of being watched and knowing nothing human is doing the looking. _

_Something flickers in the corner of his eye and skin on the back of his neck wants to crawl away. Anger rises in him again and this time, he welcomes it._

_"This is my fucking mind!" Harry snarls at the thing. "What are you doing here?" His voice rides down the register until there's nothing left but gravel and menace. _

_It laughs, sweet and feminine. Lorraine steps out of the shadows, and this isn't the young version Harry had met on the train ride. No, this is _her, _Lorraine as Harry remembered her. All long legs, spun gold curls, and laughter. She is a tall woman, nearly as tall as Harry himself and he aches with familiarity. _

_But he doesn't recognize her eyes, chill, dark holes that belie the warmth of her grin. "Harry," she purrs. "You never were a very patient man."_

_Harry's throat closes up on him and he knows he's wrecked. "Lorraine." It comes out like it sounds in his head, like a holy mantra, like the sound a drowning man makes when he's saved, like love and benediction and irrational devotion. God, when she died... he'd been torn apart, useless, mindless shell of himself. When she died... a part of him went with her. Harry is sure that it was his soul. _

_She tilts her head and smiles, hollow doll's eyes wide, staring, and as cold as ice. "Baby," she replies. "How have you been?" _

_He swallows his grief. _

_"Don't mock me,"Harry rasps. _

_"Awww," she coos. "Pity. Poor. You. You think I had it as easy as you? That I what, died in a flash of green light?" She laughs again. "No, baby, I wasn't quite that lucky," Lorraine murmurs. She pulls the neck of her soft blue dress to the side and down her shoulder, delicate collarbones bare, vulnerable, and spattered with blood. A thick chunk of meat is missing from her shoulder, the wound wet, red-black and gaping. "It took four hours for me to bleed out. And they weren't too picky about the bottom half as long as it was still whole."_

_What do you say to that? What do you say to make something like that better? "What do you want?" Harry croaks out, voice broken and faded. "What do you want from me?"_

_Her normally animated features are cool and flat. "I want peace. Can you give me that?"_

_"No," he answers whisper-soft._

_He is powerless to give her what she couldn't find even in death. _

_She flickers and then he's back in front of the spotlight with Draco Malfoy and the shitty big band music. The need to scream rises and sticks in his throat. _

_Draco is all earnest and wide-eyed and Harry wants to laugh. As if anybody could mistake _that_ for puppy eyes. "Almost everything my father did, He did for me," Draco says beseechingly. "And for me to defy him like I did, it nearly destroyed him. His life's work was trying to make the world a better place for me and my children - he did these things for what thought were the right reasons."_

_Harry blinks in confusion. What the hell? _

_"Draco, your father was fucking insane," Harry replies derisively. "Did you or did you not forget that Lucius was the one who gave your mother to Bellatrix? That he was there while she screamed and begged her way through her last moments in life?" He had been there as well, but that wasn't something _anyone_ else knew. _

_The blonde scoffs. "Oh fucking hell, Potter! I know that."_

_"Then why are you defending him!" Harry rejoins forcefully._

_Draco sighs and stuffs his hands in his pockets. "Because if you judge people... by the standards you have been..." he says in fits and starts. "...You yourself would, no, _should_ be considered one of the bad guys."_

_The howl of rage is back, battering his ears like a siege engine. __The words emerge low and mocking and he knows he isn't doing as good a job as he hoped at hiding his anger. "So, now you're taking up the position of St. Malfoy, Patron of the cruel and the damned?" _

_The blonde sneers, scar drawing up and twisting like a snake. Like how Draco would twist Harry's words if given half a chance. "It's not the dark magic, Harry. Don't be facetious. How about the Death Eater informant? Hmm? What about him? You cut his wife into pieces, _in pieces Harry,_ in front of him. And if Longbottom hadn't broken down the door, you would have done the same to his daughters too."_

_Harry punches him. Again. And again. __Blood stains the mirror beneath his feet and their reflections become unwholesome._ _He keeps hitting him until the blonde falls to the floor and then Harry drives his foot into Draco's side. Once. Twice. Three times and there's a wet crack of bone being broken and driven into vital organs. The blonde chokes, coughing up red bloody foam onto the pristine white of his suit. _

_He keeps kicking him until Draco isn't moving, isn't breathing and then the world lurches. _

_Malfoy is standing in front of him again, no blood, no bruises, suit isn't even rumpled. As if none of it had happened and _Harry_ is the crazy person committing phantom murders, bruised knuckles and all. _

_"He was the reason why Lorraine was killed," Harry rasps out, useless anger and adrenaline making his hands shake. "So I went off the edge a little - big fucking deal! _

_He crowds right up into Draco's space and arrests those reserved grey eyes with an unflinching stare. __"If you had loved her as much as I did," he murmurs. "You would have done the same thing."_

_'Try to deny that, you sanctimonious little prick.'_

_The blonde grimaces and leans back a fraction. "That's just my point. Where does the line lie? What defines that divine chasm between right and wrong?" _

_There's something large moving behind Malfoy, fog obscuring it from view. It sways back and forth in a slow steady rhythm, vaguely man-shaped, something dark and wet dripping onto the floor._

_"What the fuck -" Harry cuts himself off abruptly as he recognizes the waxy form of Draco Malfoy dangling from his own belt, barefoot and dressed in worn clothing. _

_The original blonde glances over his shoulder and raises an eyebrow at Harry. "Where's the point where you have fully crossed over and become worse than the thing you're fighting against?" he says, continuing on blithely and Harry realizes that Draco can't see his own stinking shit-stained corpse. _

_Harry licks his lips, unnerved by sight of the twin images of Draco the dead and Draco the dead-er version of the blonde. "I'm not ignorant enough of my own lack of morality to delude myself into taking the high road. You're going to have to try harder if you want me to feel guilty about what I've done. Cut the bullshit already."_

_Draco's mouth quirks into a parody of a smile, snake-scar writhing on his lip. "I guess what I'm trying to say is that people don't exactly receive memo's the moment they crossover from White Knights into Black Hats." _

_He extends his hand out to Harry, offering him a blood-red handkerchief. Harry figures with Draco's taste in clothing that it will probably be silk. _

_It is. It flows through Harry's hands like water, ruby folds dropping away to revel a black, chitinous present. He drops it with a yell and a big black scorpion, stinger poised and dripping, scuttles off the fabric into the fog. _

_There is no knowledge of what he's given Harry in the blonde's eyes. "You seem to think I don't know you're a monster," Draco says._

_Harry is taken back by that. He's never heard it said that bluntly. Oh yeah, there'd been whispers as he passed, a flurry of hushed mutterings of what he'd done. Did you know what he did to those Death Eater children, they had said. Did you know that he held them down and cut off their fingers? Their ears? Their noses? Did you know how loud they screamed? Did you know that when he was done, he cut out their hearts and made their father eat them? Did you know? Did you know?_

_Did you know?_

_Yeah, he did know. He knows it very well. _

_Harry laughs because there's really nothing else he can do in response to a comment like that. Monster? Maybe he is, but damned if he's going to go crawl in some dark hole of denial. He is what he is. When he'd found the man responsible for Lorraine's death, Harry had wanted him to hurt as bad as he did. _

_He'd succeeded._

_Succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. _

_Thing is, Neville didn't get to him before he started in on the children. There is no way Harry will every forget the look of pure, unadulterated hate and devastation on Leeland Moore's face, smeared in the blood of his wife and his children, tears marking clean tracks in all of that red. No way in _Hell_ will he ever forget that. _

_There are some nights where he, well, Harry knows he enjoyed that a little too much. Knows it's wrong. Knows it's twisted. _

_"I feel like I'm falling down the rabbit hole at Mach speed," Harry says finally. "And there's no end in sight. But Lorraine, man. I loved that woman."_

_Lorraine was... nice._

_Nice, when he hadn't normally done nice. She wasn't simple - not by any stretch of the imagination, but she was uncomplicated. A straightforward and honest woman in a time when nothing was straightforward or honest. She'd loved bitching about him being seventy-three inches of coal furnace in July. Loved tugging on his ear to get his attention. Loved eating cold pizza for breakfast. Loved sleeping in late on weekends. She was his normal. Or, at least as close as he'd ever gotten to normal._

_"And I would have married her," he continues. "If she hadn't been fucking murdered. It's not fair of you to use her against me." Harry belatedly realizes there's tears on his face. 'There's this howling tide of grief in me,' he wants to yell at the blonde, 'And it's all I can do to keep _clawing_ my way to another day! It's all I can do to wake up in the morning! How dare you make me remember her! How dare you!'_

_Draco nods. "Then do me a favour. Be fair to me and don't judge me by my father." He looks at Harry and it feels like the first time Draco's actually _seen_ him this whole time. "I know that at thirteen the man meant the world to me. But at the time, I didn't know I had other options."_

_Harry spreads his arms wide and gestures at himself."What makes you think I can do any better by you this time around? You haven't exactly given me any incentive to help you," he replies, exhausted and struggling for conciousness. The world around him is getting greyer. He hopes that's a good sign._

_The younger Malfoy tips his head back and laughs, his corpse swaying like pendulum behind him. Tick tock. "Harry," he says, his expression amused. "If you didn't care as much as you do, you wouldn't be this angry."_

The dream loosened its claws on him with an abrupt pop of his eardrums and Harry found himself staring at the dusty hangings above his bed.

"But I'm not angry," he said out loud to rooms snoring occupants, ears ringing with denial.

Harry rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He felt worse than when he had gone to bed, if that was at all possible. It felt like his stomach was trying to turn itself inside out. Struggling out of the tangled sheets, he rolled to his feet and shuffled off in the direction of the loo.

He flicked the lights on and white light flooded the lavatory.

The sense-memory image of cracked and dirty white tiles superimposed itself over cheery red and gold flooring. For a moment, he found himself back in the bunker's showers, dank and rust-stained, the air stinking of sweat and mould. Ugly black veins of decay snaked across the face of the mirror, silver backing beginning to peel and become pockmarked with dirt. The sink under his hands shifted, metal faucets turning red-orange with rust, slithering down the drain in dark streaks like fermented blood.

_No. _He scrabbled desperately at the chilly tiles by the broken mirror, but the image remained the same.

_No, no, no, __**no!**_

Harry's knees buckled and he nearly smacked his jaw against the cold porcelain of the sink on his way down. He hit the tiled floor with a cringe-worthy crack against his knees and Harry knew he'd have bruises come morning. Bile churned in his gut and tried to worm its way out of his mouth. Harry hadn't eaten last night so there wasn't anything in his stomach to throw up, but he could dry heave with the best of them. So he did. Again and again and _again_ until it _hurt, _until his throat felt like raw and bloody, until he felt like his guts were a tangled ball of razor wire - and all he could get to come up was a thin burning thread of vomit.

"Harry?" Ron said, squinting sleepily in the bright light. "What's wrong?"

Harry gasped weakly against the floor, frame folded over, arms wrapped around himself. He tried to answer, but what slid out sounded horrifically like a cross between a sob and a semi-hysterical cackle.

Ron's eyes went wide enough that Harry could see the gold flecking amongst the dark blue. "Aww, Jeez, mate!" He hurriedly shut the door behind him and dropped down beside Harry, hands fluttering uselessly as he tried to figure out what was wrong with him.

The comical sight combined with his mouth opening and closing like a fish's struck him as funny. Helpless, Harry began choking in between his attempts to puke and laugh at the same time.

"Bloody hell!" Ron thumped his back roughly. "C'mon Harry, breathe!"

His hysterics petered out leaving him twitching faintly against the cool tiles, breath deep and heavy in his lungs. Momentary fatigue overcame him as his body recovered from its convulsions. A detached sense of relief registered too, when he saw the Gryffindor colours restored to the walls. They were as festive and rich as ever, as if the hallucination had never taken hold.

"Right, there we go," the other boy muttered. Ron's large hands seized the back of Harry's long-sleeve t-shirt and hauled him upright against the wall. Water trickled overhead and then a wet flannel flopped down on his forehead.

"Better now?" Ron asked, crouching down in front of him, too short pyjama bottoms rising up around his calves.

Harry reach a trembling hand up and grabbed the damp flannel. "Give me a moment," he rasped, wiping vomit off his chin. He balled the stained fabric up and tossed it into the sink.

Ron gazed at him steady and serious for all that he was just thirteen-years-old. "I don't suppose you'll tell me what's wrong, will you?"

Harry slumped against the wall, feeling as limp and over-abused as a rag-doll. "My subconscious hates me," he murmured darkly.

Ron nodded. "Hermione says dementors feed off of your worst memories. Even I was having some mad dreams there before I woke up."

Harry raised an eyebrow.

Ron flushed. "Well nothing _really_ serious, just some crazy thingys about Hagrid's pet spiders."

"Yeah? Did they, by any chance, make you put on your grandma's lingerie and tap dance to the Weird Sisters?"

"That's just gross, mate,"Ron replied, face the colour of curdled milk.

The corner of Harry's mouth curled into a smile. "There comes a time in a young man's life..."

"Freak," Ron muttered.

"Hey, you're the self-professed leg-man. Not my fault if two isn't enough for you."

"Eurgh. There are some lines you shouldn't cross."

Harry laughed low and dirty in reply.

"Hey, Harry?" Ron began tentatively, amusement draining from his expression. "What exactly... happened after you, uh, left the compartment?"

"Nothing worth repeating." The other boy didn't look convinced. Harry rolled his eyes, mouth on autopilot. "Oh Gawd, do we have to do the caring and sharing bit?"

Ron scowled. "Don't be such a bloody berk about it! You left and then the next time I see you..." He trailed off shaking his head. "You're not right, mate. And whatever it is that's bothering you has you so messed up that you wake up vomiting, laughing like its hysterically funny! Oh sure, Harry, you're just _fine_!"

"You make me all tingly inside when you get forceful like that, Ronald," Harry replied, taken back by Ron's vehemence. "Yeah, okay, I'm not all right. Shit happens. What else is new?"

Ron frowned. "It's never been this bad before, though. What _really_ happened?" He tilted his head to the side. "You're hiding something." He said it like a dawning revelation. "Why? That's not like you."

_'It's not like I'm in the habit of lying to my friends. With most of you dead and gone, I'm a little out of practice.'_

Harry slowly let out his breath, prolonging his exhalation while he chose his next words. Ron was like a bulldog when he got interested in a subject and wouldn't let go until he got an answer that satisfied him.

"When the dementors are near me," Harry began, adding a silent _'Amongst other things if I let it,'_ in his head. "I get to watch my mother die. Over and over and _over_. And all the while, that bastard is laughing. I hear my father tell my mother to take me and run. I hear Voldemort kill him. I hear my mother tell him to take her instead of me. He tells her to stand aside. She doesn't. He kills her. Then it's lots of pretty green light for me and the whole thing starts over.

Ron was bone-white, but Harry kept on going. "You're right. I'm not okay. I am so far from okay that when three of those soul-sucking fuckers,"

Ron jerked backwards at the obscenity and Harry tried not to wince. _'Cut back on the language, bud. The kiddies aren't ready for it yet.'_

"-tried to eat me," Harry continued more mildly. "I went a little crazy. Boo-hoo for them. Too bad, so sad."

"Ah, c'mon! I'm not saying you were wrong to, uh, off them," Ron protested. "Just that you're not handling it okay."

"No shit, Sherlock. Despite what you may think, I'm not actually in denial about that." Harry rubbed his eyes, feeling far too exhausted for this particular conversation. "Why did you go off on me like that?"

"It's not... I don't know, Harry, you were just... so_ flippant_ about it. It seemed like you didn't care at all," Ron said as he pushed his knuckles into his eyes and yawned.

Harry shook his head, rubbing at a rapidly forming bruise on his forearm. Violent dreams were never very kind to his body. "I do care, Ron. I'm the last person you know who,"

_'...would be so cavalier...'_ Harry's subconscious whispered back to him.

"Would disregard something as serious as emotional distress, be it mine, yours or Severus friggin' Snape. And yes, I can say that without losing any man points," Harry continued.

_'That didn't come out the way it was supposed to. Emotional distress? Fucking Hell.'_

Ron snickered. "Snape? Seriously?"

"Give me a break. It's late."

"Actually, it's early. Really, _really_ early," said Ron.

Harry rolled his eyes again. Kids were exhausting. "Okay, Early-Bird, question of the day: are you sorry you asked? Because most of my dreams aren't exactly sanity-friendly topics."

"No," Ron replied unrepentantly. "But now I know. And now I know what to expect." He blinked. "The dementors tried to _eat_ you?"

Harry nearly smiled. "Close enough."

The other boy stood and held out a hand. Harry grabbed it and pulled himself up onto shaking legs. He turned to the sink on and stuck his head under the faucet. The shock of the chill water was enough to dispel the last remnants of the dream. The face in the mirror showed dark circles over carefully Glamoured baby-fat. Paired with his large, wearied green eyes, Harry truly looked the part of the abandoned war-orphan.

He grimaced and snagged a towel off the rack to dry his hair. "I feel like shit."

"Look the part, too," Ron said bluntly. "You're really lucky the dorm showers have silencing charms on them otherwise you'd have everyone in here."

Harry dropped the towel in a heap at the base of the sink and glowered at Ron's reflection. "If you ever tell anyone what happened here, I will string your innards up around Gryffindor Tower like Christmas lights."

"That was creative." Ron grinned. "I take it you're feeling better?"

"I'll live," he replied simply, turning the light off as he followed Ron out the door.

* * *

Albus Dumbledore sat up late into the night in his office listening to the chiming of his clocks. Silver light danced over the ceiling. The image of Harry, shivering and gibbering nonsense, wide eyes white around the edges with fear and covered liberally in thick, black blood contrasted harshly with Arabella Figg's recovered memories of the disturbance at Privet Drive.

It didn't fit.

This summer may not have tried Albus' skills as a wizard, but it had certainly taxed the limits of his patience. Not since the last war had so many things fallen apart in such a short period of time.

He'd found very little regarding Hadrian Sharr. Other than Martin's well-scavenged information, it seemed as if Hadrian didn't even _exist_. The man was a veritable ghost in the system.

Artimis was an exceedingly clever man. Tom Riddle, on his good days, could only aspire to be half as canny as his predecessor. If Artimis had hidden his family, one could assume that they would be very difficult to find.

When his attempts at finding Hadrian failed, Albus had tried to track down Harry. Underage Magic hadn't turned up anything and Albus could only trace Harry's wand through Hogwarts' student registry, not the boy himself. And still...

Nothing.

Not even a blip.

Albus sighed and stirred the pensieve in front of him again, wondering if he had missed anything in his initial investigation.

_"One day 'e was just different, Mr. Dumbledore," Arabella Figg said, nervously patting her hair. She had a funny habit of cutting off the H in her pronunciation of "he" or "him" when she was upset._

_"What do you mean by different?" he inquired. "In personality or...?" He turned his hand upward in question._

_"Ah, 'e was... bigger, stronger...darker." She licked her lips and leaned forward, eyes darting around her before continuing. "Moved differently, you know. Like 'e was made outta steel, real mean, you know. Like 'e was ah, uh..."_

_Albus nodded, the sinking feeling in his stomach proving true. "Like a predator," he finished._

_"Yes," she said nodding enthusiastically. "Like rolling - stalking. Like Mr. Tibbles when 'e's hunting."_

_Albus' Legilimency caught a flash of a white cat, belly low to the ground, eyes intent and locked forward, flowing like liquid mercury through the grass. Another quick flash of memory and Albus caught the image of a tall youth dressed in snug, worn Muggle clothing, dark hair gleaming blue-black under the street-lights, body moving with the self-same fluid ease as the cat._

_"I see," said Albus. "When did he disappear?"_

_Arabella raised her bony shoulders in a shrug. "Not more than about two weeks after 'e first got here. And after all that hullabaloo the night before."_

_"What did you see that night, Arabella?" he asked her gently._

_"Nothing," she replied. "The car blew up and then there were lights in the alleyway. The whole thing couldn't have been more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes long. Just saw 'im the next morning after wandering through the wreckage. That Aunt of his yelled at him, pointed at him and then the Muggle authorities were running after 'im."_

_"Did they catch him?" Albus asked alarmed._

_She shook her head. "Oh no, 'e was too fast. Just disappeared and that was it."_

_Albus frowned. "Dissapparated?"_

_"No." She shook her head again, wispy grey curls flying everywhere. "Just gone."_

_That much was true. There was no record of any Apparations or Disapparations into the area except by the DoM operative team._

_Arabella started to open her mouth, but stopped, looking over her shoulder on a subconscious reflex. She was so scared of Harry she couldn't even say his name. Arabella Figg may have been a squib, but she knew well the power of invoking names._

_Unease churned within Albus again. "Arabella, are you all right?" It seemed like he'd been asking that question often as of late._

_She turned slightly in her seat so she could keep one eye on the door and one on Albus. "Before 'e ran, 'e grabbed her. Tightly. Dragged her to him."_

_"Petunia?" Albus asked, taken back by the description of Harry's aggressive behaviour. That didn't sound like him - not with what he remembered of his actions during his second year. "Was she hurt?"_

_"Not that I could tell. But 'e..." She stopped, hands twitching, then forced herself to say the pronoun clearly. "He scared her. He scared her real bad. Not worried-scared, but terrified. He whispered something to her and that's when the wards fell. Then he ran and that's it. All of it. He couldn't have been at Number 4 for more than a few days total. I haven't seen him since." _

When the wards fell... The only way for the wards to fail was for Harry to knowingly declare Privet Drive to no longer be home. That action sealed it. Harry Potter was more than a little bit involved in the Privet Drive disturbance. And probably had helped orchestrate the event. He'd needed no nudging from his new-found relative.

With eight DoM agents dead and the knowledge that Harry had...

Had _what_ exactly? Helped kill them? Maybe. Not likely, but... The chances were not in his favour.

_'Oh Harry. Were you so affected by Tom's words of power in the Chamber?'_

It didn't fit. Not with what Albus knew of Harry's nature and his sense of right and wrong.

But when Albus inspected the compartment where Harry had allegedly killed the dementors, he was nearly bowled over by the feeling of dark magic. He hadn't felt such dark power since Artimis had come unhinged. To make no mention of the sheer stench of it wafting off Harry himself.

Truly, he was Artimis' progeny.

Put together with all of that, it did make sense. Frightful, horrific sense. It provoked a disquieting comparison between Tom Riddle's disappearance and subsequent changes and Harry's disappearance and return.

Against his greatest wishes, Albus Dumbledore was beginning to regard Harry as a growing threat.

In all of his long years, he'd never felt more a failure than now.

There would be no rest for him tonight.

* * *

Dreams were a strange and fickle thing. For some, they were an assimilation of the day's events, a key to understand troubling occurrences in their past or even just a night off for the subconscious to go wild. Harry was more inclined to believe that his dreams were a psychic garbage dump for his brain. Or, at least that helped explain the weird shit that kept popping up in his mind.

Something was jabbing him repeatedly in his side. Harry grumbled at the disturbance. It stopped. For a moment. Then it prodded his ribs and he rolled over, twitching the covers over his head.

Muffled snickers.

And then it started up again.

Harry blearily peeled his eyelids open and caught a flash of brilliant red hair and the eyes of all his dorm mates clustered around his bed. Some asshole had opened his hangings already.

He muttered something unfavourable about freckle-faced jerk-offs disturbing his rest and let sleep drag him back under.

Someone poked him in the side again.

"Ron," Harry growled irritably, voice half-muffled by his pillow. "I will give you five seconds to stop that before you have to explain to Madam Pomfrey how your hand got _that_ far up your ass."

A round of laughter went around the room.

"Yep, he's awake," Ron announced from somewhere near the level of Harry's face. "Might want to get moving before you miss breakfast."

Harry launched his spare pillow in Ron's direction.

* * *

The Great Hall went silent when Harry entered. Not a hushed silence punctuated with bouts of flurried whispering, but a hear-a-fucking-pin-drop silence.

Well, damn. Next time he needed everyone's attention he'd just kill something then.

Harry shuffled down the row of tables, acutely aware of every eye in the building and most especially the teachers, who watched him with a wary note in their expressions. Whether it was for them or himself he didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

"Hey Harry! Over here," came the welcome sound of Oliver's voice from the middle of Gryffindor table.

Harry nodded to him as he wedged his frame onto the bench without elbowing anyone. For some reason he remembered these benches to be much more... _roomier_. Of course, it could be because Harry hadn't originally gained most of his bulk until after he was eighteen. Things were moving faster this time and it wasn't just the events happening here. He settled into the middle of Wood's entourage and five different pairs of hands reached out to fill his plate.

Harry blinked.

"Er, wow," he said, somewhat bewildered by the overabundance of helpfulness. "I'd say thanks for the five-star service if I didn't know _one_ of those pairs of hands belonged to Fred. Or George. I'm not picky who I blame it on."

Fred grinned. "You don't trust us, old chap? That hurts, Harry, really."

Harry eyed his plate dubiously and poked at his eggs with a fork. "No Canary Cremés?" he asked, glancing up at the twins.

"No Canary Cremés," George agreed, a brief smile flickering across his face.

It was unnerving to contemplate eating in front of all that staring. But Oliver was making a valiant effort to pretend everything was normal, so he had to give him credit where credit was due.

"Why not?" Harry muttered and took a bite. If the brown-haired girl on his left hiding a smirk hadn't given it away then the tingle of magic running up his scalp certainly would. Harry pretended it hadn't happened when he saw Lorraine's slight smile. He knew her too well not to know that she was struggling not to laugh.

The twins had broken the stranglehold of silence. Muted laughter fluttered through the air, sound gradually swelling back into the Great Hall. Conversation resumed itself around him and Harry was grateful for the redirection of their attention. Even if they were still talking about him, at least they weren't eyeballing him like he was about to go berserker on them.

"So where did everyone go?" Harry asked, noting that most of the third years were absent.

Oliver raised his eyebrows. "Your first class is due to start in 7 minutes. And since you're taking Divination, I suggest you get a move on it."

"It's clear across the other side of the castle," said Dom, another seventh year and close friend of Oliver's. Funny how many people he'd forgotten from school. "And in the North Tower, mind you."

Harry shook his head. "I'm not too worried. I know a couple of short-cuts that'll get me to the North Tower faster than they will."

"You sure about that -" began Oliver.

"Damn sure, Ollie," Harry replied, pointing his fork threateningly at him.

The girl beside him laughed. "Merlin, Harry!"

Harry made a face and hunched further in his seat. "What now?"

She smiled at him, pushing a short brown lock of hair out of her face. "Listen to the pipes on you."

He sucked on his lower lip before releasing it with a pop. "Okay," Harry said, turning to her. "First you make fun of my height, then you make fun of my voice -"

"I'm not making fun of you!" she exclaimed indignantly, smile still edging around the corners of her mouth. Which was a very nice mouth to look at.

_'Jailbait, you asshole! What part of jailbait didn't you understand!'_

When this was over, Harry was putting his dick in time-out. "Yes, you are," he replied, unable to keep from smiling back.

"He's flirting with you," Lorraine said in a sing-song tone over the top of her goblet, the bright shine in her eyes betraying her amusement. It took all of his restraint not to reach out and touch her, follow the long line of her neck with his mouth, to see if her skin still tasted the same. Still laughed the same. God, he wanted her.

Harry's lips curled into a soft smile. "Am not," he murmured, turning back to his plate. Danielle, that was the girl's name. He felt bad that he couldn't remember it earlier.

Dom smirked at him. "Going after older women, are we?"

Harry opened his mouth then closed it with a click. "There's no way I'm going to be able to answer that without embarrassing myself, is there?" he said finally.

"Nope," George replied.

"Not likely," agreed his twin.

Harry nodded. "Right then."

"Harry."

He glanced up at Oliver. The Quidditch captain looked genuinely concerned and Harry wondered how he could have missed this last time around. Oliver truly cared about the younger years in a way that most of the older students didn't. McGonagall should have given him the Head Boy badge instead of Percy. And maybe she _had_ offered.

"Are you all right?" asked Oliver. "You scared us a bit last night."

Harry was beginning to understand why Hermione rolled her eyes all the time. "I'm _fine_, Ollie. I spent two and a half hours last night in the Hospital Wing with Madam Pomfrey poking me in every orifice imaginable." He leaned over the table. "I swear, the next time someone asks me if I'm okay, I'm gonna shove a spoon up their -"

"All right!" Oliver said, holding his hands up in surrender. "Spare me the details, please."

Harry settled back in his seat. "Actually, I'd really like it if this whole thing would just die down already. I mean, I'm fine. Everyone else is fine. It's fine. No big deal."

Oliver laughed. "You're going to have a tough time convincing people of that. You did give them something pretty juicy to gossip about."

"More gushy than juicy," Harry replied blithely, mouth on autopilot.

Oliver stared uncomprehendingly at him. Come to think of it, he looked a little green too.

"Well, what was I supposed to do?" Harry said to Oliver, who still hadn't moved. "Lie back and think of England?"

There was a small moment of silence at the table in which Harry desperately regretted opening his mouth.

Finally Lorraine smiled and patted Harry on the arm. "Give us some time, Harry. We need to, ah... _process_ things a bit first. You're doing well, though, yes?"

Harry nodded. "I'm okay. Maybe not in the most traditional sense, but..."

Her smile widened into a full-fledged grin. "Gotcha. I'll see if I can't get the others off your back."

It took a lot not to start blubbering tears and apologies to her. _'Oh fuck it all. I apparently have the emotional stability of a thirteen-year-old girl. How fitting.'_

"Thank you, I appreciate it." He glanced over his shoulder at the presence behind him. "Hello, Professor McGonagall," Harry replied, giving her an angelic smile. For a woman her age, she was surprisingly skilled at sneaking up on a person.

"Mr. Potter, " she said adroitly. McGonagall handed him his course schedule. "I advise you to pay close attention to _when_ your classes _begin_," she said raising an eyebrow at him, black hair drawn back in her customary bun.

He bobbed his head in agreement. She never failed to make him feel like a young schoolboy again. "Yes, Professor."

Her expression never flickered. "And Mr. Potter, If I might make a recommendation?"

"Professor?"

A glint of amusement in her sharp grey eyes. "Fuchsia is not one of your better colours."

His hand instinctively shot to his head.

Pink hair. Damn Weasleys. _'Slap on a pair of boobs and call me Tonks.'_

"I'll keep that in mind, Professor, thank you, " he replied, borrowing some of her composure.

Her mouth twitched into what might have been a smile and she continued on down the aisle to a group of boisterous fifth years. They looked suspiciously like the same idiots who tripped him on the train.

"I think that was my cue to leave," said Harry as he heaved himself off the bench. "Hey Ollie, got a question for you."

Oliver pulled himself out of his stupor. "Yeah, what?"

"Why did you turn down being Head Boy?"

The Quidditch captain inhaled sharply and choked on his spit. "How...?

Harry frowned. "You shouldn't have. You would have been a lot better at it than _that_ prick," he said, gesturing at Percy who was sitting with his girlfriend and a few other Ravenclaws.

Oliver's eyes were wide and startled. "Jesus, Harry! How did you know?"

"Because Percy isn't anyone's first choice," he replied sardonically as he walked off.

The dimensions of the landing to the Divination classroom were small enough that all of the Gryffindor third years couldn't fit on it at the same time.

It was entertaining to watch them try though. Ron and Seamus started a small scuffle that resulted in Ron on his ass three steps down from the landing.

"Harry!" he said brightly from where he was sprawled at Harry feet. "Why's your hair pink?"

Seamus' laughter quickly cut off as the rest of the students whirled around to stare at him. Ron had obviously shared the little story Harry had improvised for him. It was a question of which was worse: pity or fear?

"I felt like a change was in order," Harry replied, ignoring the other children. He grabbed Ron's arm and hauled him to his feet. "McGonagall has already voted nay, but the twins said it looked great. What do you think?"

"Uh..." Ron trailed off. He looked from Harry to the rest of the students and back again.

A thick cloud of silence hung over the landing.

_'Did I accidentally wander into a remake of Children of the Corn?' _Harry glanced around. "As flattering as the stares are, they are also _really_ creepy," he announced.

Seamus flushed uncomfortably. "Sorry. You er... seem okay compared to last night; I didn't see you get back to Gryffindor Tower last night."

"Madam Pomfrey kept me back for a bit," said Harry. "She had me so drugged up on calming potions I'm surprised I wasn't drooling on myself."

Lavender scrunched up her face in an expression of disgust. "How did you get rid of all that blood?"

This was awkward. How the Hell did he get through six years with these people with out tossing them out the nearest window?

"Soap and water works wonders," he replied dryly.

He was saved from answering more ridiculous questions by the trapdoor opening and a ribbon festooned ladder falling from the hole.

Harry didn't remember his interactions with his peers to be this strained. But then again, they weren't his peers. Not any more. The thoughts of Harry the soldier crept all too easily into the thoughts of Harry the student. He'd thought he was a better actor than this, he mused as he followed Ron up the ladder.

And yet...

Children could sense things. Children could sense things where others fumbled blindly in the dark. Their hyperactive imaginations hadn't been trained to ignore the things that went bump in the night, their instincts benumbed by social grooming. There was something there that opened them up to extrasensory information; something in the hind-brain that told them when to run, when to hide. Whatever it was, they knew he wasn't right. Wasn't one of them.

He glanced over at where Hermione had manifested on the landing. Not her most subtle entrance with a timeturner that he'd seen, but she was new at it – she would learn.

Hermione wrinkled her nose in distaste when she took in the chintz armchairs, small round tables adorned with crystal balls, dusty shelves full of tarot cards, teacups, and funny antiques that chirped and whirred without any visible magical stimuli. Tiny flickering stumps of candles glimmered in small, fabric shrouded alcoves; the billowing scarves fluttered in a complete lack of moving air giving Harry the impression that the room itself was breathing and the students inside were trapped in it's hungry red gullet.

Almost nothing remained of the original classroom. Strings of artfully draped crystals dripped from the ceiling, looking like thousands of little beady eyes blinking in the firelight.

If Trelawney was going for weird, she'd gotten it. In spades. Harry had seen horror movies with less creepy sets than this.

"This... is a _classroom_?" said Hermione despairingly.

Harry sniffed the air and grinned as he joined Ron at one of the tables. Now he knew why Trelawney burned so much incense. "I smell pot," he announced thoughtfully. Opium, too, for that matter.

Medical supplies during the last three years of the war had been increasingly scarce. Often times when Poppy had to pick shrapnel out of Harry or one of the veterans, she'd given them a couple of hits from the hookah and settled down to work once they were appropriately dazed. Primitive anaesthetics it may have been, but it worked. He didn't blame Poppy for not wanting to operate on someone like him without being properly knocked out. PTSD was a bitch to work around.

Seamus laughed. "In that case, I think I'll enjoy this class. "

Dean Thomas rolled his eyes. "You said that about potions until you realized we weren't actually going to brew beer."

"Tomato, tomahto" the Irishman said dismissively.

Parvati twisted in her seat at the front of the class to give Harry a dubious look. "Why do you even know what pot smells like anyway?"

"Yes Harry," said Hermione, a mischievous note entering her voice. "How _do_ you know what it smells like?"

Harry grinned at her. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies."

"How often does that line actually work for you?" Hermione asked dryly.

"More than it should," he replied truthfully. "Less than I want it to."

She rolled her eyes and swatted him on the shoulder with a rolled-up bit of parchment, an exasperated smile stretching across her face.

There was a rattle of many metal bracelets clanking together and their great, gauzy dragonfly of a professor emerged into the firelight.

"Greetings, my children," she said in a faint, airy voice. "And welcome to Divination." Trelawney spread her arms wide to encompass them, her glittering shawl looking like sparkly insect wings. Her smile was slack, drooping at one side like it was ready to slide right off her face and land on the floor next to her pile of crystal balls. Her eyes were glazed and vacant, pleasantly displaced like she'd taken one too many puffs at the toke.

Hermione must have shared his sentiments because she murmured darkly into her hastily propped-up Divination text, "This ought to be fun."

Ron leaned over to Harry. "Speaking of so stoned you're drooling on yourself."

Harry nodded. "We have an escapee from the loon commune." Good to know Trelawney hadn't changed.

Hermione let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Two tables in front of them, Parvati turned in her seat to glare at her.

Trelawney drifted over to the enormous winged armchair in front of the fireplace, gauzy robes floating around her thin frame. "I am Professor Trelawney," she said as she adjusted her glasses. She rambled on into a lengthy dialogue about the wonders of the Sight and Harry was greatly entertained by Hermione's souring expression.

"No books will help me if I don't have the Gift?" Hermione hissed vehemently. "No books? What a ridiculous teaching method. She could at least teach theory even if the student doesn't have talent."

He tried not to smile. "Calm down, Hermione. She's not worth getting excited over."

Hermione made a sound like steam escaping from a tea kettle.

"I think all this smoke is clouding my Inner Eye," Ron muttered.

"Feeling hungry, Ronald?" Hermione snipped under her breath.

Lavender turned and hissed at them. Harry got the impression that Hermione wasn't too fond of her dorm mates and that feeling was mutual. He didn't remember her having many female friends.

"- and we will be studying the basics of Divining this year. This term we will cover the reading of tea leaves and afterwards, palmistry. By the way, dear girl," Trelawney said to Lavender suddenly. "Have care when playing with fire."

Lavender's eyes widened and she nodded her head vigorously. She would grow into a very beautiful woman, but she would never have much in the way of brains. Pity, he always hated it when good looks were wasted on a vapid cow like that one.

"After palmistry," Trelawney carried on. "We will progress to the crystal ball and then, hopefully to tarot cards. We will not be studying augury until your fourth year. Our classes together will unfortunately be interrupted by a bout of food poisoning in March and -"

Harry tried valiantly not to fall asleep.

* * *

Ron peered thoughtfully into Harry's cup. "You know, I don't see how we're supposed to see anything other than soggy tea leaves."

"Just think of cloud watching on a sunny day," Hermione replied dully.

Harry looked up at Hermione and tilted her cup towards her. "I predict that this class will be a source of great disappointment and boredom to you."

She gave him a crooked smile. "_I_ predict that this class will be the butt of many jokes," Hermione rejoined, setting Ron's cup down with a clank on the table.

"See, you're psychic already," Harry replied as he watched Ron turn his teacup round and round in his hand, a pensive frown marring his expression.

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Found anything useful yet?" he asked. "Like maybe the answers to McGonagall's next test?"

Hermione gave a very unladylike snort. "Would that you could be so lucky."

"Hey, I'll take all the help I can get," he said with a grin. He waved a hand in front of his friend's face. "Ron? Did we lose you in there?"

The red-haired boy was silent. Harry shared a look with Hermione.

"Ron?" she asked.

"Ron wears women's underwear," Harry dead-panned. At the table next to them, Seamus spit out a mouthful of hot tea across his copy of Unfogging the Future to Dean Thomas' amusement and Parvati's disgust.

"It looks like dogs," Ron said finally. "No matter which way I turn it, it looks like dogs. Dogs jumping over one another like those never-ending knots."

"Celtic knots? Really? That's unusual." Hermione flipped open her copy of Unfogging the Future and ran a finger down the page. "Dogs symbolize loyalty. Deep, abiding, and steadfast devotion," she announced. "Especially in the face of peril and chaos." She looked up at Harry, meeting him eye to eye. "I'd believe that, Harry. You _do_ inspire great loyalty in people," Hermione said candidly.

The sound of a train whistle screamed in his ears.

_Against the wailing and tears of the crowd, eighteen-year-old Hermione Granger was a spot of calm acceptance in a sea of chaos. Curls damp from the rain, eyes deep and sad, she seemed quietly angelic, wise and humble._

_None of the milling Aurors dare lay their hands on her, not as long as Harry stood there. _

_She hadn't run when he told her to, hadn't hidden where Harry showed her to go. She stood up for the Muggleborns, publicly disagreed with Scrimgeour's power-crazed policies, and calmly submitted to her subsequent arrest. _

_Harry held out his hand and helped her into the train car packed full of faceless Muggleborns like cattle to a slaughter, bony hands and arms poking out from the slats, grasping desperately at thin air. _

"_It will be okay,"she said. _

_I love you. I trust you. I know you will rescue me, Harry read in those words. He didn't know who she was trying to convince because _he_ certainly didn't believe it._

_The whistle blew again and the hulking metal beast began to move. They were taking her away and the only thing he could do was stand there. Guilt took flight in his chest like a razor-feathered bird. _

_He stood there like a lump on a fucking log, property of the Ministry of Magic stamped all over his ass like it was a justifiable reason for his inability to save her. His hands were chained to the shackles of bureaucracy, his soul bought and paid for, and here she was absolving his guilt from the very people prosecuting her, when the truth of the matter was that it was Harry who had arrested her, Harry who had brought her in for questioning, and Harry who had prosecuted her; she was guilty without ever seeing the hope of a trial. The irony was fucking hysterical. _

_They made him do it. They told him: which was more valuable? An outspoken Muggleborn of middling power or himself? And God, of all the selfish things to do, he'd picked himself. Told himself that he was the only one who could kill Voldemort. Told himself that she was strong. Told himself that she would be okay. Told himself that he'd come for her, save her, like there wasn't an ever-tightening noose around his neck of his own making._

_Harry didn't know who was full of more shit: Scrimgeour for writing the bill or himself for believing he could fix things._

_Ron stood beside him on the platform shouting and gesturing madly, struggling against the blockades they suddenly found themselves up against. __The red robed forms of the Aurors that stood between them and the rails held up their hands apologetically, saying, _"_You must stay back. You are not authorized to pass through here. Aurors only after this line."_

_The train began to accelerate.__Hermione's calm, dark eyes met his own for the last time._ _ And then the wind shifted and steam rolled over the crowd and Harry lost sight of her._

_He felt like he was swimming underwater; the people around him were shouting, jostling him and he couldn't hear them, couldn't feel them. Ron's warm hand fell on his shoulder and a sudden roar of rage sang in Harry's blood. _

He'd permanently crippled three Aurors that day and injured thirteen more. All without the use of magic. Their spells slid off of him like water. Somehow, Ron managed to knock him out and take him home before anyone could retaliate.

Hermione perished months before Harry found out where they were holding her. He hadn't been able to save her.

"Harry?" A small hand landed on his forearm.

He looked up from his contemplation of the tabletop into Hermione's worried face. "Too much," he rasped. "Too much loyalty for what I am worth."

"You're not making any sense," she said with a frown, eyes searching his own, grasping firmly at the loose folds of his robes.

"I'm sorry," he replied, knowing he was apologizing to her older self and knowing it was far too late.

Compassion melted her frown and for a moment, she looked so much like her older self that it left him reeling. "It's okay, Harry." Hermione shook the hand holding his sleeve. "It's going to be okay."

Here was another person who took a part of him with her when she died. If Lorraine took the second part, Hermione had taken the first.

"I hope you're right," he murmured, laying a hand over hers on his arm.

_'I hope like hell you're right. Because you're not going to like what's coming if you're not.'_

No-one else noticed while Harry took a ride down the Sanity Slip 'n Slide. Their conversation must have been to quiet, too brief, because Ron was still enamoured with the dogs in Harry's cup. No-one paid them any undue attention.

Good. He wasn't a big fan of public breakdowns.

"Broaden your minds, children! Let the world fade away," Trelawney cried into the heavy clouds of incense hanging over the classroom. She swooped down on Ron. "Dear boy, what have you found?" she said, snatching the cup from Ron's grasp.

"Dogs," Ron replied somewhat bewilderedly. Trelawney wasn't a very stable person; one moment she would be all airy smiles and vague declarations of the future, the next, all overly dramatic doom and gloom. It was a little exhausting to be around.

"Lots and lots of dogs," Ron continued. "Like big, dark wolfdogs, you know."

* * *

The cup vibrated in her hands.

This one held darkness, practically throbbed with its own energy. The cup radiated a fey, brooding presence that dripped with hostility. It was hungry, and its cry beat like a rook's wings inside her skull, feathers as black as night.

Trelawney's hands trembled.

The cup looked normal, a crack running through the middle of the cheaply glazed porcelain, sticky tea leaves clinging to its sides. There was nothing in the lees of the cup to suggest...

_Wait._

Light flickered over the rim of the cup. Something in the lees began to hint at the shape of a paw, the gleam of large teeth in a thin muzzle, the flex of muscle under a thick coat of fur. The boy was right. _Dogs_, lots of dogs. Dogs in the residue of the tea. Dogs running. Dogs leaping. Dogs pouncing. Dogs slinking low to the ground, their bellies concave, their ribs skeletal, thick ruffs of fur standing up like spikes along the bony ridge of their spines.

Grims, lean hungry creatures gathered together by the hundreds. It was enough to make her suck in a breath to shout out in terror, the sound escaping whisper-soft like a sigh.

There was another who slunk in and out of his leapfrogging companions. His shadow fluttered along the edges of her vision, the matte black of his fur and the yellow shine of his teeth flickering in and out of view amongst the rough-housing Grims. He was a large hound, obscenely muscled where his companions were lean. He was most likely a stray. He had the look of one. His coat was matted with mud and brambles and he was liberally battle-scared with long crusty lines bisecting the coarse fur.

The dog was slowly starting to face her, its shadow darting through the other's legs. They were moving faster now, frantically, no longer playing but running, pale eyes rolling white with fear in their bony skulls. As if they were suddenly discovering the interloper amongst them, the one who smelled sick and wrong, the true monster in the midst of wolves.

She could see the white speckles on its heavy muzzle, lips wrinkled and beginning to peel back. She could see the dark shine in its blood-coloured eye, the other white and blind, hungry and hateful.

Trelawney turned the cup. The Grims tumbled over one another, faster and faster, spit flying in the air from phantom howls, tails curled between their legs. Lightning quick, the stray struck, tearing one of its companions' throat out, a spray of arterial blood misting the air, the Grim nothing more than raw meat now, and the stray vanished again.

She could feel it watching her, crouching low, hungry and malevolent, eyes murderous, instincts sharp and vicious.

The dogs tumbled over themselves, forever running in circles along the circumference of the cup. They sprinted faster, baying pitifully, running away from the homicidal spark in the cur's eyes. It was snarling now, a low, ugly buzz-rumble that vibrated up her arms and rattled her teeth. Her hands clenched uselessly around the steaming edges of the cup.

A glob of hot saliva dripped from the cur's jaws, lips fully peeled back from a set of fangs that couldn't possibly fit in the brute's head. It had coiled as low to the ground as it could go now, thick muscles bunched tight and trembling with rage.

It knew her.

It knew her and it wanted her dead.

_'It's coming.'_

It faced her fully now, steam rising from its nostrils, malevolent spark glowing bright in its single red eye, the other a pale milky disk weeping thick, yellow pus. Its jaws were beginning to open, crooked sawblades spilling from the brute's yawning mouth.

It would pounce, spring at her belly, bury those ugly, urine yellow teeth into her abdomen and tear her open.

She whimpered.

The cur went crazy at the sound of her voice.

It jumped.

* * *

Trelawney screamed and flung the cup away from her. It hit the opposite wall hard enough to shatter in a fine spray of white china. She turned and ran for the trapdoor, stumbling over one of the fat beanbag chairs and landing on her hands and knees. Babbling with fear, she scuttled over to the trapdoors like some spindly, oversized spider and she nearly fell down the ladder in her haste to flee.

The trapdoor swung shut, trapping one of her gauzy shawls in its grasp. The class listened to her screams echo and fade in utter stillness.

_'What the hell?'_

Harry set Hermione's cup down on the table from where it had been frozen in his grasp. The resulting **clack** turned every eye in the classroom.

"Er... Outlook _not_ so good, I guess," he said to the stupefied gazes of his year mates. He was definitely dropping this class the next chance he got.

"What did you do to her?" breathed Lavender, blue eyes wide as saucers. "Why... what..."

Harry frowned as he studied the shards of his teacup. For a moment, a flat dark shadow hovered among the pieces then vanished. "I don't know," Harry replied.

_'But I'm going to make a vague assumption that what she saw wasn't very pretty.'_

* * *

Albus was startled from his conversation with Augusta Longbottom by the door to his office bouncing off the wall.

"Hellhounds!" Trelawney wailed, eyes rolling wildly in their sockets.

"One moment please," he murmured to the Longbottom Matron as he rose from his desk.

Augusta sniffed imperiously as she got up from her chair. "That's quite all right, Albus," said Neville's dictorial grandmother. "It seems that dementors are the least of your problems."

As if she could insinuate any further how unsafe Hogwarts was for her grandson. To be fair, the lady did have a point. For Neville's first year it was a broken arm for the boy and an agent of Voldemort infiltrating the school. His second year featured petrified students and a basilisk on the loose. Now it seemed that his third year was shaping up to be dementors and escaped convicts. The record was not looking good.

"If we could continue this conversation at a later date," Albus began, wanting to start bringing together the Order in response to the threat of Hadrian Sharr. "I would very much like to hear the rest of your concerns."

"Good day, Albus," Augusta replied, drifting regally out of his office.

Trelawney had tried to stuff herself into the smallest corner of his office she could find, her eyes glazed with fright.

"Dear Sybill," Dumbledore exclaimed softly as he led her to a chair. "What has disturbed you so?"

* * *

Lunch had come and gone along with Draco's first class of the year. The Slytherins had a free period that afternoon and Draco intended to spend it studying for Snape's next class. Thankfully most of his godfather's attention would be taken up by the Gryffindors; a good number of the brews listed in his textbook were completely unfamiliar to Draco.

The common room was unusually noisy, conversation revolving around Potter's first appearance in the Great Hall since the dementor attack. Draco shuddered. He hadn't managed to shake that feeling of cold dread, hadn't felt safe since watching the dementor's black robe drift past him in the train's corridor. He was quite aware of how closely oblivion had walked by him last night.

"Hey Malfoy!"

Draco looked up from his comfortable spot in the corner of the common room. No one claimed this armchair because of how far away from the fire it was, but there was ample light from the small table lamp and Draco was accustomed to less than ideal temperatures. The Manor was much chillier than the Slytherin common room.

It was Bletchley who had called his name. Draco tended to stay away from Miles and his group of friends mostly because of how strange they were. Not just slightly odd like Lovegood, but psychotic strange. He had come across them torturing the first years cats in loo his second year. After that, he gave them a wide berth.

Bletchley continued when he saw that he had Draco's attention. "You saw Potter after he killed the dementors."

Draco nodded curtly. The eyes of everyone in the common room were focused on him. He was curiously uncomfortable with the attention – nothing like how he usually felt. He did not revel in it, he just wanted it diverted elsewhere considering the subject matter.

"What was he like?" asked Bletchley.

Normally Draco would take this time to lord his answer over the older boy, something he didn't often have the opportunity to do. But this time...

What had Potter been like?

He finally had the attention of the entire common room and the only thing he wanted to do was hide. Draco closed the textbook on one finger and rubbed at the pulsing pain by his left eye. He'd spent an entirely sleepless night tossing and turning in sweat-soaked sheets. He knew Madam Pomfrey kept headache remedies on hand, but it was a matter of pride for him.

"Calm," he said slowly into the silence, eyes heavy with exhaustion.

_'Keep it to yourself,'_ his father's voice chanted in his ear. He should. There was no need for anyone else to know what happened in the compartment after the dementor attack. But... Why? What if someone set Potter off? Shouldn't they know what he was capable of?

"Very calm," Draco continued. "Not shocked or stunned. He was in control... with none of those silly theatrics he put on for you." He chewed on his lip, a horrible habit his mother struggled to break him of. "He knew what he was doing," said Draco, unconsciously nodding his head in agreement. It was true, Potter had seemed like an entirely different person. The duality of his personality was unsettling.

He looked down at the fading gilt-edged pages of Snape's old potions textbook. "He asked if I was hurt," Draco said softly.

_'Or at least I _think_ he did.'_

"And then he asked if anyone else was hurt and he told me to go look. So I did."

Bletchley lip curled. "You obeyed him?"

Soft mocking laughter floated around the common room.

Draco's father had also told him that nothing was won without a gamble. He stared Bletchley down and Draco knew his eyes were burning with the memories of the attack. He wanted to laugh because the older Slytherin didn't see it, didn't see what was right under his nose, and Draco did.

_'He's playing you, Potter's playing all of you for the fool,'_ Draco thought fiercely. _'And nobody else can see it.'_

"He had dementor's blood smeared from head to toe," Draco murmured. It wasn't his father's elegant drawl, but it captured the attention of those around him better than his emulations of his father ever had. In their eyes he had changed from the privileged snob into a poisonous snake. It felt right, like he hadn't noticed how ill-fitting the other persona was until he'd tried this one on for size.

"And a gleam in his eye that said he was more than a little comfortable with that." Draco smiled. Not the thin, closed mouth smile of his father, but a snake's smile, a quick razor-sharp flash of white teeth. "Forgive me if I wasn't going to argue semantics with him."

The soft laughter of the common room was on his side now. Bletchley's eyes flared with hate and Draco felt an answering thrill in his belly.

He knew he was playing with fire.

But maybe, just maybe his gamble would pay off.

_'All right, Potter. I'm throwing in with you for now. Don't you dare let me down.'_

* * *

There was a great snowy owl perched on the back of Shorner's chair, flaunting its wingspan as it waited. How the bird had gotten into his office was a mystery to him – the DoM was located six floors underground.

Shorner reached out to untie the letter. The owl eyed him balefully, but held still as he removed the letter from its leg before vanishing in mid-air.

It was from Harry. There was no name on the outside of the letter, no insignia on the wax seal, but it vibrated with the same resonance as the air around his wayward operative. Shorner broke the seal and unfolded the parchment.

_Archie,_ it read.

_By now I'm sure you've heard of the incident with the dementors on the Hogwarts Express. Call me paranoid, but I don't believe that they were sent by the Ministry – not in those numbers. Officially, I'm sure they're probably saying that five or six dementors boarded the train in pursuit of Sirius Black, but Archie, there had to be at least a hundred by my count. The Ministry, for its shortcomings, would never knowingly risk children like that. _

_I have reason to believe that the dementors were sent after me deliberately with no care for collateral damages. _

_My position here has been compromised. I'm going to have to play this one by ear. Too many people know of my identity as Hadrian Sharr. __I can only hope that this doesn't end with me initiating a new bodycount._

_Be careful. If they know about me, they know about you. They may come after _you_ next._

Harry hadn't bothered to sign it. The letter shrivelled into dust in his hands and dispersed in the air.

It was enough to start turning the wheels of Shorner's mind. How had Harry's identity gotten out? It wasn't himself. He hadn't told a damn soul. Then who?

Who would...

Blackwood.

But why would Connor have said anything? What did he stand to gain from Harry's death?

Shorner shuddered and hurriedly finished packing up for the day. He slung the last of the files he needed into his leather knapsack, exchanging his robes for a simple corduroy jacket, and headed out of his office. Locking the door with a flick of his wrist, Shorner set off down the hallway.

Loud voices were raised ahead of him. One of the junior liaisons had broken a box of crystal inkwells used in writing secure notices. He was being severely berated by his supervisor, her hairpins flying everywhere in her rant.

Like everyone else on the floor, Connor had come out of his office to watch the spectacle. Shorner pretended to observe the sideshow along with all the other employees, but kept a watch on Blackwood from the corner of his eye. The man leaned against the wall, huge frame seemingly relaxed, but his gaze never left Shorner.

Blackwood's eyes followed him all the way to the lifts and Shorner breathed a sigh of relief when the doors closed behind him.

If he had needed confirmation of his suspicions, that was it.

_'Damn you Harry. How do you always manage to get me into these situations?'_


	16. Skeleton Hunt I

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Chapter Fifteen

Skeleton Hunt

There was a Faerie Queen sitting beside the Thames River.

The scent of wild flowers and balmy summer air hung over the wharf, as otherworldly as the being herself. Ivy crawled through the aged wooden slats of the bench and an array of brilliant orange and pale pink flowers had sprung up through the cracks in the concrete around her legs, which ended in a delicate pair of hooves like those of a deer.

She wore butter-yellow, the gown falling loose and filmy around her calves. A belt of golden links shaped like leaves was draped over her hips, studded with topaz and tiger's eye. Over this, she wore a short jacket of a rich, russet-toned velvet embroidered in green and gold along the sleeves and lapels. Her hair, a pure white like a dove's feather, brushed her shoulders in wild, unbound curls. Her green eyes flickered gold as she watched the figure make his way to her, peach-coloured mouth firm and unsmiling.

He bowed at the waist. "My lady, Titania."

"Sit," she murmured and despite her neutral expression, her voice was warm and familiar. "Tell me, what news do you bring?"

The figure settled beside her, leaning forward and bracing his elbows against his knees. He swallowed before answering. "Rumours that Mab gave up a part of herself to bring him back are circulating. Considering who I heard it from, I'd say that there was more than a little truth to the matter."

The Summer Queen inhaled sharply. "Truly, her insanity increases."

He hummed in response, gazing out over the water. "Maybe so. And maybe not. She _did_ pick Harry. For all that he has become a dangerous wild card possessed of a chilling amorality and a dire lack of conscience, he is very much aware of his shortcomings. In the end, he _will_ aspire to do the right thing. And I think because of that duality in him, Harry succeeds where so many others fail."

"You believe him to be ruthless yet tempered by mercy," Titania murmured, white curls rustling as she tipped her head to the side like a curious bird.

The man turned to her and nodded. "He poses something of a conundrum, but yes."

Her eyes were wholly gold for a moment before fading back to green. "Then for your sake," she said. "I hope Mab's gamble proves lucrative."

"Gamble?" the man replied, surprised and somewhat wary.

The Faerie Queen smiled, her soft peach mouth turning wry. "Mab is fond of using individuals like him in her opening gambits."

The man's brows lifted incredulously. "This has been done before?"

"Not quite like this," Titania said lightly. "Never quite like this."

"Huh," said the man, turning to look out over the water. "Should I warn Harry that -"

He glanced back at the bench. The Summer Queen was gone; weeds surging up around the cracked cement, her garden of colourful flowers vanished along with their creator. The stench of river-water and dead fish assaulted his nose once more.

The man sighed and his shoulders slumped. "Lord," he said softly. "What fools we mortals be."

* * *

The day after Divination class was difficult. It was bad enough that he'd slain four dementors, driven by desperation or not. Add in running poor Trelawney out of her own classroom screaming in terror and people began to feel a little uneasy around him.

Charms and Care of Magical Creatures passed without much fanfare. Thankfully, Draco hadn't done anything stupid during Hagrid's class. He just eyeballed the Hippogriffs cautiously and kept himself surrounded by his cronies at the back of the padlock. There'd been a moment where Harry was worried about Buckbeak's skittish behaviour; the beast's orange eyes had rolled white at the edges when Harry came near and only his quick reflexes prevented Buckbeak's fierce claws from tearing his arm open. He'd kept his distance from the creature after that.

Ron flew on the Hippogriff instead and had been quite pleased with himself until he realized how odd it was that the creature had tried to attack Harry. Hagrid was a little bewildered by Buckbeak's behaviour, but his cheerfulness returned after Harry had joined Ron and Hermione at his cabin for tea when class was over.

Dinner was quiet and tense at Harry's portion of the Gryffindor table despite the efforts of Oliver and the rest of his friends. With all of the happenings of the past two days, concerns about Sirius Black seemed to have fallen by the wayside.

Harry stirred his soup half-heartedly, feeling the events of the last few days drag on him like weights. He wasn't used to being tied down like this, wasn't accustomed to being confined in a cage and watched like an animal.

_'I've got to get out of here tonight. Couldn't even last a damn week without using the timeturner. Wormtail, you bastard! Why won't you show your fucking face!'_

* * *

Hermione watched as Harry picked distractedly through his food, composing her question in her head, trying to find a way to phrase it without antagonizing her friend and failing miserably.

_'Harry, you've avoided talking to me long enough...'_

Oh yeah, _that_ wouldn't sound accusing at all.  
_  
__'Harry, I'm worried about you...'_

And now she sounded like a bleeding heart. Long proven to be the surest thing to drive Harry away.

_'Harry, what happened in divination class? One moment Trelawney was fine, but the next...'_

She could hear it already: Needy, nosey, know-it-all Hermione who had to micromanage everything.

_'Harry, you scare me so badly that sometimes I dream about you tearing me apart with your bare hands and when I think I wake up, I find you standing over me with blood smeared up to your elbows...'_

She grimaced and ran a hand through her hair. Hermione didn't know where these dreams were coming from. Something had wormed its way into her subconscious and no matter how much she cared about her friend, nothing could shake the notion that Harry was Dangerous with a capital D.

Harry was still Harry, but something in him had warped irrevocably over the summer. It was just enough to catch her off-kilter when she least expected it; she'd look over at him and find him staring over someone else, a glitter in his eye that promised rage and violence, that sticky stormcloud smell rising in the air. It had only happened once when one of the older Slytherins had knocked shoulders with Harry in the hallway betweens classes. The boy had smirked and called out 'Sorry!' very unapologetically over his shoulder. Ron was all up in arms about it, but there was a chilly note in Harry's expression that shouldn't have been there.

It was enough to cause her skin to crawl and a shiver run up her spine.

Hermione ducked her head and tried to catch Harry's eyes from where they were staring at his plate. "Harry," she said softly.

He jerked like he'd been startled and stared at her over the rims of his glasses, green eyes gleaming sharp and bright under the fringe of his eyelashes. His hands tightened around his utensils, muscles jumping rapidly in his forearms. There were shadows in his face, and it seemed like it actually took Harry a moment to remember who was sitting across from him, he was so deep in thought. There was something in the way he was sitting that reminded her of a predator, something big, big like a jungle cat curled low to the ground and ready to pounce. It was something in the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head and the total focus of his attention that spoke of barely leashed control.

Uh oh...

Hermione's stomach cramped with nervousness. "Are you okay?"

Abruptly, the mood seemed to fall away from Harry like a second skin. "Yeah, I'm good, just dreading Snape's class tomorrow." He smiled and leaned over like he was sharing confidential information. "I didn't exactly get a chance to work on potions over the summer."

There was another thing that bothered her. The way he kept deflecting all of the questions directed at him with seemingly important information, but never really giving anything away.

Hermione gathered up her courage. "Could I talk to you, please?"

Harry raised an eyebrow.

"Alone, preferably," she amended.

He frowned, worry creasing his features. "Is something bothering you?"

Her heart warmed and a little of the fear dissipated by that statement. "Not exactly," she said wryly. Ron was well engrossed in a discussion with Seamus and the twins. Good, no chance of interruption from him. She was quite fond of her other friend, but emotionally, Ron acted all of about nine-years-old. He hardly ranked as the most mature individual she knew. "I'd rather talk about it somewhere else, if you don't mind."

"Sure," he replied, nodding his head. He stood from the table and waited for her to gather her books together.

"Thank you," Hermione murmured, apprehension beginning to settle back in.

Harry shrugged. "No problem. Hey Ron," he said, snapping his fingers next to the boy's ear to get his attention.

Hermione cringed. _'Oh please don't, Harry! I don't want him to hear this. I don't think he can handle it.' _

Ron jerked his head back from Harry's fingers and nearly slammed his brother in the face with his skull.

"Oi! Watch it!" Fred bellowed, rubbing his nose.

"Sorry Fred," Ron muttered, scowling at Harry. "What do you want so bad you had to do that?"

Harry grinned. "Hermione and I are headed out, we'll meet you back at the tower later."

Ron looked confused. "Why?"

"It's girly talk time," Harry replied with a lisp. He grinned at Hermione and continued on in his normal voice. "I could make a joke about it being that time of the month, but then she'd stop speaking to me for a week."

The redhead rolled his eyes as the twins snickered. "You have fun with that."

Oliver Wood, who had overheard them, snickered into his food at Harry's pronouncement. Hermione chewed on the inside of her cheek, tension twisting too tight in her gut for her to laugh at their antics.

She quietly followed Harry out of the Great Hall and up a few flights of stairs before recognizing where she was. "This is where Dumbledore hid the stone!"

Harry smiled warmly at her. "Yes, I thought from the tone of your voice, you wanted some place private." He gestured up at the cobwebs hanging from the rafters and the layer of dust over the floor. "Also, there's this."

He stopped in front of a door next to the hallway leading to where the stone was hidden their first year. One unlocking spell later, the door opened to reveal an unused classroom.

Hermione was impressed despite herself. "How did you find this?"

"Got bored one night before the Basilisk affair during our second year," he said as he dusted off the teacher's desk and sat down cross-legged on it. "So what's up with you? You're practically vibrating."

Hermione twitched and she nearly lost her grip on her pile of books. "Ah..." she said stalling for time as she dumped her books onto one of the student desks, heedless of the dust. "I'm not sure how to put it..."

Harry waited patiently for her to find her voice again, chin propped up on one hand.

She folded her fingers together and unconsciously began pacing around the classroom.

Hermione had worn a tread in the dust down a row of the desks before she decided to throw all caution to the wind.

"Yesterday, during Divination, if I didn't know better, I'd say that was a flashback."

He raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

Hermione chewed nervously on her lip. "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is commonly defined as profound psychological trauma. It can also include serious physiological and emotional trauma. The symptoms have been diagnosed to include flashbacks, nightmares, irrational anger, hypervigilance, increased arousal and difficulty falling or staying asleep."

She glanced back at Harry, who hadn't made any move to stop her or acknowledge what she'd said. "Possible sources of trauma include violent assault, kidnapping, sexual assault, war, being a prisoner of war, being a hostage, torture, drug addictions and abuse."

Hermione crossed her arms in front of her as if she could protect herself from his reaction. "Ah, the disassociation – that's a mental process that severs your connection to your thoughts, emotions, memories, your sense of identity, it's an unexpected disruption of your normal thought processes – the disassociation that follows after the trauma usually predicts Postraumatic Stress Disorder: how much you try to distance yourself from your experiences tells how bad your symptoms will be."

She stopped talking, not daring to look at Harry. Silence stretched across the dusty classroom and Hermione distracted herself by looking at the sun shinning through the little motes of dust dancing through the air. The windows of this classroom were magical, judging from the sun peeking through them. She was sure that the real sky outside was the velvet black of night.

A warm hand settled on her shoulders and a shriek tore its way out of her throat. Hermione stared back at Harry's concerned expression with wide startled eyes.

"Why are you afraid of me?" he asked, the corners of his mouth turning down in a frown. He searched her eyes with his own and Hermione wondered what he saw there. "Is it because of what happened with the dementors?"

"I don't know," she replied truthfully.

"I did what was necessary." He stated it like it was the most logical conclusion to her problem. It was probably the scariest thing she'd ever heard him say; talking about killing things as if she was asking him why the sky was blue and the grass was green. Silly questions for silly girls.

"I... understand that." She didn't, but there was no way she was telling _him_ that. "But it doesn't stop me from being frightened of you. That you're capable of that." Hermione wondered if this was the smartest conversation to be having with him considering his potential instability.

He stumbled back in surprise, hand slipping off her shoulder, arm still outstretched like he was warding her off. "Why? I'd hurt myself before I'd hurt you."

Hermione smiled faintly. "I know that, but it's hard to know it here," she said tapping her head. "As well as here." She laid a hand over her heart and watched him curl into himself.

Harry was silently running his knuckles over his bottom lip, eyes focusing on something past her. She didn't dare turn around to find out what.

"You're so different," Hermione continued. She laughed helplessly and raised arms in a shrug. "And at the same time, you're obviously not, which is probably the scary part and... I don't know how to help you." Hermione shook her head and frowned. "What happened over the summer, Harry? The man you stayed with, did he... did he hurt you?"

One awful scenario after another ran through her mind. God, she didn't want to think about it, but it was there, same as the part of her that thought dark things of Harry.

"Hurt me?" Harry asked nonplussed, confusion writ in his features. "No more than an intensive training regime requires. I doubt that anyone could lay a finger on me that I didn't want them to." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Well, clumsiness aside."

Hermione shook her head. "Then why –"

"The craziness? The craziness of the dementors? Or the craziness of yesterday's Divination class?" Harry finished for her wryly. "Truth is, I did some things over the summer – by my own will, mind you – that haven't sat very well within my subconscious. I'm okay most of the time, but sometimes they catch me unaware."

"Things?" Hermione asked weakly. "What kinds of things?"

He shrugged. "Just some things I needed to take care of. They probably would have stayed buried for a while longer if the dementors hadn't come through and stirred things up."

Oh God, what had he done?

"Harry, it sounds like you could use some help," said Hermione, beginning to put together a very ugly impression of just what _things_ entailed.

Harry caught her eye and held it. "You're doing more to help me than you think. Just by being you, young, sweet and normal, you're doing more to help me than anybody else possibly could."

It was flattering thing to say, but it didn't stop her from wanting to run away from him as fast as she could. "You're sure of this?"

"Yes." He smiled, wide and happy. "Now I don't know about you, but I'm ready for today to be over with."

Hermione nodded, forcing herself to smile. "Okay, Harry. I'll meet you up at the tower; I have a couple of books I want to grab from the library."

He left the room, leaving her alone with the dust and her thoughts.

* * *

Geoffrey Cotts was an old school chum of Shorner's from his Hogwarts days. Due to his photographic memory and a gift for analysing the raw data collected by field agents, he'd spent seven years in a high ranking position in Field Surveillance for the Depart of Mysteries before setting his sights on politics.

One of the younger and far more radical members of the Wizengamot, Geoffrey was part of the new movement sweeping through the undercurrents of England's social venues. The future was at hand and it was due to the conservative ideals of the old pureblood families that wizarding England hadn't moved past the late Middle ages. Cairo, even with its clash of religious mores and magical history was further into a new century than the U.K.

Cairo was crowded today, heat waves rising up from the streets of the wizarding quarter. Even in the morning hours, the air was dry and it scorched the inside of his throat when he inhaled.

Geoffrey's mixed heritage allowed him to blend in with the locals, something he was eager to do after his failure to correct England's outdated transportation laws. His legislature to legalize flying carpets was shot down once again by Crouch. The man's influence had waned considerably since the scandal with his son, but Bartemius Crouch was as hard-nosed as they came. Between his considerable fortune and the many favours owed to him from the war twelve years earlier, Barty Crouch had his fingers in everyone's pie.

Cairo's biggest public transportation, like most of the Middle East, was based on the flying carpet business. The rugs were surprisingly to produce and the fibres used to make them held enchantments very well. To say nothing of the production costs, which made Geoffrey wonder what Crouch's motives in this were. Somewhere along the line, Crouch stood to lose a lot of money.

Geoffrey flicked his eyes across the bazaar from his comfortable seat at the corner café.

It was the man's suspicious behaviour that gave him away more than anything.

He stood out amongst the bazaars of wizarding Cairo like a sore thumb. Whereas the native inhabitants were of a rich caramel skin tone, this man was obviously Caucasian. Sweaty, sunburnt skin, an unshaven chin and beady blue eyes poked out of his burnoose and Geoffrey hazarded a guess that under his tattered head-scarf, the man was as bald as a cue ball.

Rat-like, he'd call the man. Rat-like, pudgy, and nervous. The short man held a frantic sort of energy about him and was obviously on the run from someone. Debt-collectors, probably.

But something in the man's watery eyes set Geoffrey's teeth on edge. He didn't like people bringing trouble into this part of the world. It was all too easy to start an international incident around here and that was the very _last_ thing he could afford to happen – not even on the Ministry's cushy salary.

Geoffrey stood and followed the man past a trio of black clad dancing girls outside a bar. Sisters, he supposed, judging by their similarities; their silver-belled feet stomping raucously on a blue tiled floor to the sound of trilling pipes, dark gazes flicking over their patrons under heavy lashes. Two stalls down, a wrinkled old wise woman hawked rare potions ingredients at exorbitant prices. 'Rat-man' as Geoffrey had taken to calling the foreigner, took a twisting, evasive rout through the busiest parts of the bazaar.

Scurrying around a slender man dressed in the traditional robes of an Egyptian wizard, Rat-man abruptly stepped off the main road and took a sharp left down a narrow alleyway. Geoffrey cast a small 'notice-me-not' charm and strolled casually past the alley, watching him out of the corner of his eye. The foreigner stopped in front of a door off of the alleyway. Teal blue paint peeled off the door in large flakes revealing the dark red of its previous incarnation and rusted iron bars were drawn over its single window.

Rat-man's head-scarf slipped and for a moment, Geoffrey Cotts saw a man who died twelve years earlier.

Peter Pettigrew fumbled roughly at the lock and shoved the door open, slamming it behind him hard enough to rattle the mud and wood frame.

Geoffrey pretended to browse through a stall on the side of the alleyway and waited to see if Pettigrew would show his face again. No such luck. Ten minutes passed with no sign of the previously-thought-dead hero. Geoffrey slipped through a door at the end of the alleyway and Disapparated back to his hotel room.

Picking up the old rotary-style phone, he dialled the number of the one person he knew who wouldn't think he was crazy.

The ring tone warbled on the other end of the line before a groggy voice answered. "Yeah?"

"Shorner," said Geoffrey, keeping his voice low and as normal he could. "No chance I could get an international Portkey off of you?"


	17. Skeleton Hunt: Interlude

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

Credit in this chapter goes to Amerision and Hashasheen for their help in straightening out my language!fails and answering silly questions about names and places. Thanks brahs – your awesomeness abounds.

Chapter Sixteen

An Interlude of Sorts...

"Egypt," Shorner repeated, his mind still dazed with sleep. "What the hell is he doing in _Egypt_?"

The sound of his old friend's voice echoed in a tinny chuckle over the line. "You don't sound surprised."

"I'm hard to surprise these days," Shorner admitted. He kicked off the bedclothes and struggled to his feet, Muggle cordless jammed against his ear with his shoulder. "Where did you see Pettigrew?" he asked as he fumbled for his wand.

"Aren't you worried about someone listening in?"

"Not with magic, I'm not," said Shorner, lighting the wall sconces with a flick of his wrist. Light bloomed in the narrow hallway of his flat and Shorner picked his way through the piles of dirty laundry and old take-out boxes to his office. "I paid a shiny Sickle to install a secure, magically-resistant Muggle landline in this place. I don't even have a damn Floo address here. Might as well be living in the dark ages, but I sleep well at night."

"Getting paranoid in your old age, Darren," the voice on the other end of the line declared cheerfully.

"Bite me," Shorner growled.

"Grumpy, too," Geoffrey mused. "I saw Pettigrew in the Cairo Wizarding Quarter."

Shorner dragged his chair out from his desk and collapsed into it. Light from the hallway spilled into his office from the open door; a long rectangle of amber light throwing up hash chiaroscuro shadows over the towering bookshelves and haphazardly stacked rolls of parchment. _'Paper…? Right, Harry. Write to Harry. Idiot.'_

"You still there?" Geoffrey sounded worried. "Sorry to wake you at this hour. I thought you'd be up by now."

"M'fine," Shorner muttered as he scrawled out a letter to his wayward agent. "I've got the windows permanently blacked out so my internal clock is a little messed up."

"How hard are they working you over there?"

Shorner shifted the phone to the other ear and rolled out the kinks in his neck. "Hard enough. You're sure you saw him?"

Geoffrey made a noise of assent. "In this weather? I definitely double-checked to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. The last twelve years haven't been kind to him, but I know what I saw. Peter Pettigrew is alive. "

"Well, damn," Shorner breathed, confirmation destroying his last bit of hope that this was all just crazed ramblings of Harry's over-taxed mind.

"No wonder Black broke out." Geoffrey laughed, disbelief and something like admiration entering his voice. "I would too if the man I'd been accused of killing was still up and walking about."

"How long will you be in Cairo?" Shorner sealed the letter shut with a drop of hot wax and a stinging hex for anybody who wasn't Harry.

"Long enough to get a Portkey off of you," Geoffrey promptly replied.

He pushed his chair back and left to find an owl. "No need," said Shorner, kicking a pile of rolled-up blueprints out of the doorway. "I'll send him to you."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Send _who_?" asked Geoffrey, his words coloured with a healthy note of suspicion.

Shorner smiled and carefully set the phone back in its cradle.

* * *

Cairo fucking stank.

It was a fragrant combination of unwashed bodies, putrefying trash in the streets, and all manner of animal droppings cooking in the sun – a bit like the aroma of an outhouse filled with dirty diapers on a very hot day.

It didn't help any that the Portkey had dropped Harry straight into Cairo's slums where magic was used sparingly and cleanliness was an afterthought.

Peter Pettigrew's holiday paradise was located in a squat, shit-brown building along the outskirts of the Wizarding district. Bleached to a light sand colour at the second story where the sun hit it each morning, there was almost nothing to set the place apart from its brethren on the haphazard row of mud-speckled flats.

A faint smell of ozone lingered in the air – the tell-tale sign of dark magic. No sign of Portkeys or Apparation however, no abrupt disturbances in the currents of magic around him. It seemed that Wormtail had done, he'd left the scene on foot.

Harry opened his eyes.

The bright sun of Cairo at noon seared his sensitive pupils, Shorner's ex-Field Surveillance contact standing to his left and waiting calmly for his assessment of the situation.

"I'm terribly sorry for troubling you like this, Lord Sharr. But Pettigrew escaped before we could restrain him and he left behind a wide swath of destruction without much we can show for it," said Cotts in a low voice. The man seemed to have recovered the composure he'd lost when Harry had introduced himself as Hadrian Sharr.

Politicians – it didn't matter where they came from or who they might have been ten years ago, they all ended up the same flavour of kiss-ass in the end.

Harry swallowed back the scoffing laugh in his throat and nodded. "I can see that."

There was a dead man sprawled across Pettigrew's doorstep.

Flies rose up from the corpse, wings heavy and buzzing in the soupy Cairo heat. The man stared sightlessly up at the sky, cream-coloured robes dusty and spattered with dark, half-dried fluids, blood pooling thick and sticky on the hard-packed sand of the road.

He'd been split open from thigh to throat, a jagged line of raw meat rent into his flesh. And any remaining wisps of dark magic had long since dissipated under the bright Cairo sunlight.

"Sloppy, Wormtail," Harry murmured to himself. "Very sloppy." He stepped over the fallen form of Wormtail's unlucky victim and eased the blood-spotted wood of the door open.

The sewer stench was worse inside the building, mixed with the smell of stale incense, boiled eggs, and onions. Bile sat thick and slimy in the back of Harry's throat – he'd smelled better corpses than this place. A crumbling, blue-painted staircase wrapped around the building's innards, rusted wrought-iron railing wobbling precariously if Harry put any weight on it, the solid sound of Geoffrey Cotts' footsteps following along behind him.

The door to Wormtail's living quarters hung half-torn from its hinges, lock broken, wood splintered. Harry sniffed the air. The bitter-sharp residue of dark magic lay heavier in here.

Wormtail's one-bedroom flat was a wreck. Furniture overturned, windows broken, glass strewn about the floor. Little beads of blood dotted the mess, a shoe-print smeared in red leading to the door. Harry crouched down to inspect the print closer. It was almost obscured by the remains of what looked to be a table, but one step later the smear turned into a definite rat's paw.

Harry turned back to the man standing in the doorway. "Who was the first person to come across Pettigrew?"

"I was," said Cotts, raising his wand and casting a muffling charm around them. "I don't know if he noticed me, but I'd wager he was worried about bigger things and failed to catch sight of myself."

Never underestimate a rat with his back to the wall, Harry thought to himself with no small amount of sarcasm. "When did you see him?"

"Around eleven o'clock this morning."

Alarmed, Harry stopped shuffling through the mess on the floor. It was a little after three in the afternoon. "How long has Pettigrew been missing?" he asked, careful to keep the note of anxiety from his voice.

"I don't know." Cotts placed his hands in his pockets and leaned back on his heels. "I followed him back to this place and waited for fifteen minutes before I left to contact Shorner. Judging from the carnage he left behind, he must have fled the scene less than an hour ago. I can get somebody to track his Apparation points -"

Missed him by less than an hour. Harry shook his head, resisting the urge to start punching holes in the wall. "That's not going to do you much good. Pettigrew is a rat animagus. He probably transformed and hitched a ride on a Muggle vehicle out of the country."

Cotts' expression showed disbelief. "That's... inconvenient."

Harry nodded and picked up and chair that was missing one of its legs. Leaning it upright against the wall, he kicked the rest of the mess aside, not wanting to touch the shattered pieces of porcelain cups and bowls. There was something here that he was missing and it set his teeth on edge.

A broken spiderweb of glass radiated outwards around a small hole melted into the window. Harry fingered the edge of the cooled pane, noting the electric buzz of dark magic still lingering on the glass.

It looked like the remains of a branding hex. A simple spell, but it looked like whoever had cast it was using an ill-suited wand because the hex shouldn't have broken the glass. The heat alone would have burned a clean hole through the window – no mess, no fuss.

Underneath the window was a smoky streak of blue splattered across the wall. Harry looked over at the door, judging where it stood in conjunction to the spellburn under the window and a picture began to form in his mind.

Someone had come in through the door, someone Wormtail hadn't expected.

"Did you send in Aurors after Pettigrew?" Harry asked, only half-interested in the answer. He didn't think Cairo's Auror force would be using this level of dark magic, but it didn't hurt to ask.

Cotts hadn't moved from his place outside of the door. "This was purely a surveillance manoeuvre. Shorner told me to wait for you before we moved in. Told me that Pettigrew was an unknown entity and that you'd had some experience in dealing with him."

He could tell that Cotts was feeling no small amount of irritation at being tied up waiting for Harry's arrival. Cotts probably believed it was bureaucratic red tape, but in all honesty, Harry had left England as soon as Shorner had secured a Portkey headed for Cairo. And that wasn't counting the six hours he'd gained using the time turner.

Harry wasn't comfortable associating with the same people who nearly convicted him of murder. But there wasn't much he could do about it. The DoM had him by the short and curlies last time around; this time, well... he'd have to play it safe this time around.

"Were there any signs of a struggle reported to the local police?" Harry asked.

"No." Cotts glanced around the room once before meeting Harry's gaze. "Why do you ask?"

From the way the door hung on it's hinges, it looked like it had been blasted open, not battered down. Pettigrew had been sitting at the table – eating probably, judging by the freshness of the food – and he'd been surprised, tumbling from his chair to stand in front of the window where the hex had sailed through.

Harry looked up from his perusal of the mess on the floor. "When you alerted the Aurors, what did you tell them?"

"I told them that this man was wanted in questioning for possible criminal activity," Cotts answered without hesitating.

"Nothing else?" Harry said, raising an eyebrow.

"I made sure not to mention his name." Cotts smiled, a sheepish half-grin that took years off of his face. "I didn't want to go out on a limb on the off-chance it wasn't Pettigrew and only an unfortunate look-alike."

Harry nodded. "Good call." He gestured to the mess in the room. "There was a struggle here between Pettigrew and another individual. And not one of them used magic to leave the scene. Probably to avoid detection. In fact, if you hadn't seen Wormtail, we wouldn't even be here."

"Wormtail?"

"Schoolyard nickname." Funny, the last time Harry checked, Sirius was still in England. "Did Pettigrew have any outstanding debts among the locals, maybe someone who would be willing to collect on it? Violently?"

"No, Pettigrew was a non-entity around here. Nobody knew him or recognized him."

Somebody else was after Wormtail. A new player Harry didn't know.

But none of this new knowledge made the feeling of old, _old_ power disappear. It hovered along the edges of his senses, just faint enough to taunt him, an irritating itch in the back of his mind. Harry swung open a small door adjacent to the room and found Pettigrew's dirty lavatory, the sink chipped and basin teetering precariously. He grimaced and stepped away.

"What are you looking for?" Cotts asked, coming into the room.

Standing in the middle of the room didn't help him find it any better. Harry spun in a slow circle before meeting Cotts' curious gaze.

"You don't sense it." It wasn't a question.

Cotts stilled and closed his eyes for moment. "I can tell there was dark magic used here, but beyond that, no," he replied, shaking his head. He stared back at Harry, expression open and honest. "I don't have any talent for sensing magic outside of the obvious."

"All right." Harry scanned over the mess again. "Wait. Take off the muffling charm for a sec."

Once the spell was cancelled, his senses lit up like a Christmas Day parade.

In the corner was an entirely unremarkable book overturned on its pages. Harry bent down and ran a hand over the book, searching for curses before picking it up.

Oddly heavy for its slim size, the book was bound in a plain, dark leather worn shiny and smooth along the spine. Blood, far older than the dead man's outside, stained the edges of the pages. Flipping it open to a random page in the middle, Harry studied a hand-inked drawing of a thestral's skeleton and the thin, dark lines of a pair of ornate daggers. On the next page was a picture of what looked like the Veil of Death in the middle of a circle of standing stones, robed entities kneeling before it as a man, drawn with his mouth in an open wail of terror, eyes absurdly wide, was tossed into the fluttering Veil.

"Lord Sharr."

Harry slammed the book shut, glancing to where Cotts gestured at the doorway. A pair of dark eyes and a shock of brown curls peeked around the frame.

"This is Samo," Cotts said, motioning for the boy to come closer. "He lives down the hall; he says he saw some of what happened when Pettigrew escaped."

The little boy grinned at him and rattled off a long string of Arabic too fast for Harry's admittedly poor skill to understand.

"Tell me what he's saying," said Harry, interrupting the flow of words. "I don't speak the jabber-joo from around here very well."

Cotts tilted his head back towards the boy, listening intently. "Samo says that the rat-man lived here for several months, always sneaking around at odd hours. The rat-man made his mother nervous enough to start bringing the children in early."

"The rat-man?" Harry asked, surprised at the boy's astuteness. Kid was an observant little bugger.

"Yes," the boy said in accented English. "The rat-man." His face contorted into something thin and fervent, nose wrinkled and eyes squinting into a strikingly close imitation of Wormtail's pinched expression.

Cotts caught Harry's questioning look and responded. "Samo knows enough English to pick up small sentences and phrases, but he is embarrassed to speak it just yet in front of strangers. He says he learned it from his cousin who works in a hotel for the tourists. He also knows some French and a bit of Greek as well."

The corner of Harry's mouth quirked into a smile. "Ask him what happened when the rat-man left."

The boy smiled, bright and gleeful.

"He says there was a fight between Pettigrew and a dirty, yellow-haired wizard dressed in torn robes."

_Shit. _

"Another wizard?" Harry replied. "Describe him for me."

"Tall, thin and freckled. Very pale with light-coloured eyes. Samo says that the man looked strange, half-mad, he had wide, staring eyes and he didn't blink very often. Had a funny down-turned twist to his mouth." Cotts looked over at Harry. "I'm afraid that doesn't match the description of anyone I know, ruling out the possibility of Glamours and Polyjuice."

"Can't say I recognize the bloke either." Harry fished a Galleon from his pocket and gave it to the boy for his efforts. _"Shokran."_ _Thanks._

Samo, who couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old, smirked and said something that made Cotts choke back a startled laugh.

"What? What did he say?"

"I'm not sure –" Cotts began, turning and admonishing the boy in a quick, low voice.

Harry rolled his eyes and waved for the man to continue.

"He says that your Arabic sounds like goats mating."

Harry snorted. "Cute kid. Tell him if he thinks that sounds bad, he should hear my Urdu."


	18. Skeleton Hunt II

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**A/N:** Credit needs to go to my woefully under mentioned, but awesome beta: Andromalius. My shit wouldn't be half this awesome without his criticism and praise. A thanks also goes to Ozzeh for fixing my grammar mishaps as well. Cheers if you can catch the nod to Barb's work. The Dresden shout-out should be pretty obvious. The Supernatural one – not so much.

Chapter Seventeen

Skeleton Hunt II

Depravity came in every flavour imaginable.

Pimps, prostitutes, pickpockets, convicts, undercover Hit-wizards, drag queens of every size, shape, and species. Cat fuckers, baby fuckers, paedophiles and exhibitionists. Flashers. Dark Wizards. Tweakers high enough to fuck a dragon and try to piss on the remains. Merlin only knew that there were enough crazies drifting in from the housing Projects on Cryptic Alley to fill the Painted Rose to the brim on a Thursday evening.

The pub on Knockturn Alley catered to wide range of patrons: thrill seekers, black market dealers, junkies from the cheap housing located behind the shops of Knockturn Alley and the occasional off-duty manual labourer just looking for a pint and company for the night.

So when the dark-haired young man sauntered in, Annie didn't think much of him beyond his quick smile, long legs and whether or not he'd be interested in meeting her behind the bar on her break. She marked him as a thrill seeker because he didn't have the hungry look of a dope-dreamer, or the oil-slick manner of a dealer casing for a sell, and he certainly wasn't dolled up enough to be one of the whores out mincing around for clients.

Annie looked the young man over again, noting the torn denims, plain grey-green robes and scuffed boots that had seen better days. Didn't seem to be from the nouveau rich that rose to power in the years after the Dark Lord's fall. Wasn't a pureblood either; he lacked the stiff, over-powdered snobbery of the pureblood nobility that stopped by the shops at the mouth of the alley where it joined with Diagon.

He was a half-breed of some sort. Had it stamped all over his features, if the hypnotic hum of power in the air around him didn't give it away first. She turned away to keep from watching the lines of his throat work as he swallowed.

She knew his kind. Psychic predators through and through. Like always recognized like, she thought, glancing down at the gloves covering her hands to hide the paper-thin webbing between her fingers. Annie hoisted a heavy tray of tankards over her head and slipped through the noisy patrons to a group of regulars at the front table.

By the time she'd finished, the young man had already been to the bar and was making his way to the back of the pub.

The door opened, admitting another crowd of people. One man broke off from the group, catching her eye in the way everybody else seemed to ignore him.

Annie raised an eyebrow. That was one hell of a Notice-Me-Not charm. She'd have been just as clueless as everyone else, if not for the legacy of her mother's blood.

The young man from earlier waved the newcomer over to his booth in the back.

There was a certain resemblance between them, both tall and dark-haired, something similar in the breadth of the shoulders and the shape of the nose – half-brothers, maybe – but the newcomer was rougher around the edges with heavy shadow on the jaw, his grey eyes a little too intent. He wasn't dressed any worse than his companion, threadbare robes clean and mended. Still good-looking, but way, _way_ too thin and ragged to be healthy.

This other man, he reminded her of someone, but damned if she could figure out _whom_.

Annie picked up a damp rag and wandered over to the spare table near them. The clinking of the glasses in her hands almost drowned out their conversation, but she could hear enough.

"How's home, sweet home?" the young man asked, voice brushing over Annie's skin like velvet.

His companion chuckled, low and hoarse. "Mother is still a screaming bitch. Being rendered in paint, and not flesh, hasn't curbed the force of her personality one bit."

The younger of the two snorted, rolling rings of condensation into the table with his beer. "Pleasant company."

"She died a few years after I..." He trailed off, licking at the chapped spots of his mouth, eyes turned away from his companion in an almost guilty gesture.

The young man nodded. "Right."

His companion reached a shaking hand out and wrapped it around the heavy tankard. "She's been quite vocal about me showing up again after all these years," he said after drinking deeply. "Not sure whether she should scold me or praise me."

"Peter's gone."

* * *

His eyes were older than James' ever were.

James' dark double watched Sirius from across the table, expression as implacable as a marble statue. "Did you hear me? Peter's gone. His trail went cold in Cairo – I won't be able to do anything 'til he pops his head up again."

All of the fury and betrayal Sirius felt at the sight of Wormtail sitting on the young Weasley's shoulder in the faded newspaper photograph was gone.

No, not gone.

_Diminished_.

Because sitting in front of Sirius was something far worse than Azkaban – a thin veneer of pleasantness lying over violence just barely reined in. Ravenous, but not sure what would appease that maddening hunger for _more_. More blood, more death, more power. Never enough, never satisfied.

God, what had Harry done to himself?

"Gone," Sirius croaked, mouth dry with apprehension and keenly aware of the green eyes fixed upon him. He took a drink, rolling Harry's words around in his mind. Gone, as in Wormtail had left as soon as he caught wind of Sirius' escape. Frustrating beyond belief, yes, but Harry was staring at him like he expected more. More what? Anger? Sirius didn't have the energy to spare on useless gestures of fury; he was barely keeping afloat as it was.

The muted amber light from the bar cast a warm glow over the table. Aside from the crazies and its location on Knockturn, the Painted Rose was actually an attractive spot for a drink. He'd been too worried about being caught last time he'd visited to truly appreciate its ambiance.

A laugh caught in his throat and he swallowed it back before it could escape. Here he was drinking with his thirteen-year-old godson with the gut-level knowledge that somewhere, somehow Harry had transformed himself into a stone-cold killer and he was reminded less and less of Regulus or Narcissa or Bellatrix and more of what a young Voldemort might resemble.

The last time he met Harry, eight out of nine men had lost their lives in an assault lasting less than five minutes.

He wasn't afraid. He was too exhausted to be afraid and the only thing left was an ugly mix of shame and guilt. So Sirius squared his shoulders and charged into the fray with all of the damnable Gryffindor recklessness he could muster. And if the sharp scent of ozone wafting off of his godson made his skin crawl, the tale-tell sign of dark magic, then Sirius was careful not to let it show. He wasn't sure when Harry had become so _wrong_, but Sirius was sure it had begun with his decision to switch places with Wormtail.

"_That rat-bastard!"_ he snarled, surprising both himself and Harry with the amount of venom that slid out; low and savage, and a lot more honest than he'd intended.

Harry reached and grasped his wrist, startling the hell out of Sirius, Lily's eyes burning phosphorescent green in the hazy candlelight.

"I will hunt him down for you." He tilted his head and stared at him, intent and almost fervent, something cold and merciless watching Sirius from within. "You got to promise me though, that'll keep your head down. There's too many people on the lookout for you."

Sirius' insides knotted into a ball of ice in his belly.

Hunt him down.

_For you_.

Sirius hadn't missed the subtle emphasis.

_'Like you did to those men that night on Privet Drive?'_ he thought.

He was reminded for a moment of a cat his mother had kept around the house. A lean, sleek-looking creature, all bright eyes and shining black fur, it had a habit of catching rats in the garden out back. It would maul them to the point of senseless squealing, tails ripped off, limbs shredded, bodies broken and bloody, half-dead, but still twitching. The cat, Caliban, liked to leave them hidden around the house so that an unsuspecting wizard might put a bare foot down on one in the dark hours of the morning, cooled, slimy blood squishing up between his toes. The sly beast possessed more than a passing fondness for Sirius, leaving him all manner of presents scattered around his rooms.

Caliban disappeared a year and three months after he'd first arrived in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. The animal had spent an entire night in the bathroom adjacent to the master bedroom, chasing a fat, pregnant mouse around and around in the fancy claw-footed bathtub. Walpurga Black woke the next morning to find the mouse's remains smeared up one side of the tub and down the other, its tiny pink babies hanging half-chewed out of the mouse's open belly. The cat vanished a day later as such creatures did not belong in a distinguished and civilized pureblood household.

Sirius' head must not have been screwed on right because an image of Harry stalking across the dirty floor on his hands and knees flashed before his mind's eye, sticky blood dripping down his chin, Pettigrew's shrieking animagus form dangling from his bare white teeth.

Harry went still.

For moment, Sirius worried that he'd said some of that out loud.

"Miss," Harry said to someone behind Sirius, his tone light and flirtatious. "Would you mind?" He smiled, holding his empty up in the air and shaking it.

"Right away, sir!" chirped a sweet feminine voice from the booth behind them. Sirius flinched, startled at how close she'd gotten without him noticing.

Harry set the bottle down and pushed it to the side. "Sorry 'bout that. She'd been cleaning the table for a bit too long and was starting to make me uncomfortable."

"I know a good silencing spell..." Sirius began, not sure if he should be encouraging Harry's paranoia or escaping out the back door before fur started flying everywhere.

His godson shook his head. "Better not to, actually. It would draw more attention than it would deflect."

"How are you going to find him?"

Harry shrugged surprisingly wide shoulders. "Where there's a will, there's a way."

Sirius tugged a hand through his still too-long hair, wondering if this was the point where he began to tear it out. "Yes, but where would you even _begin_ to look for him? He's a rat, for Merlin's sake. The only thing less noticeable is a gnat!"

Smiling, Harry accepted his fresh beer and offered the pretty Selkie two Sickles in return. "Then I guess I'll have to get an extra big fly-swat," he replied, eyes fixed on the sway of the girl's hips as she walked away. Harry fit the edge of a plain silver ring on his left thumb under the lip of the bottle cap and flicked it off, lid bouncing off the front of Sirius' dark blue robes.

Harry grinned at him, sharp edges of his personality hidden once more under the façade of the playful rogue. "But I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say that he's headed for Eastern Europe."

"Why there?"

"Because that's where Voldemort is," said Harry, casually blithe as if he was stating simple fact and not something that dumped Sirius' entire world on its head.

"He's still alive?" Sirius was unable to keep the utter horror he felt from his voice. The world tilted sideways as he grasped at the edges of the table. "Dear God, No! I thought Lily had taken care of him!"

Harry's gaze swivelled towards him. "Lily did what?"

There wasn't a threat in those words. There didn't need to be. The rising smell of thunderclouds and tar in the air around him was a thousand times more unnerving than a declaration of intent to harm; Sirius needed no reminder of what Harry was capable of.

"She said she had found something that might work against him," Sirius replied, wobbling in his seat. "She asked me to steal a few books from the Black library at Grimmauld Place. Whatever she was working on – it wasn't good." He shook his head, struggling to remember what she had asked of him and failing. "James and her fought for _weeks_ about it. I remember you, though. I took care of you after James went to work and Lily would collapse for the day."

The intensity of Harry's stare hadn't lessened, but the dark magic swirling through the air around his godson had settled, less like an avalanche ready to tumble down on Sirius' head and more like the unhappy grumble of snow settling against the mountainside on a wet day.

Sirius swallowed, Lily's weak _Obliviate_ beginning to shake loose from his memories. "Before they went into hiding, I remember that she disappeared with you. Vanished for a whole week. James thought Lily had taken you and run, but she showed up again, dressed in white furs even though it was the middle of summer. _You_ were different as well. Bigger and you were walking, too. I was very surprised when you started talking right in the middle of dinner. Not very articulate mind you, but I could tell what was being said."

His godson had propped up his chin on the palm of his hands, mood now completely calm. "There was something else."

"Yes," Sirius agreed. "You were covered in these marks – runes, but nothing I could recognize – they were shiny like opals, cold blue-white opals."

Harry's expression darkened, but he said nothing.

"They faded after a few hours," Sirius continued. "And didn't show up again as far as I know, but James watched you constantly after that. He had a hard time putting you down even when you fussed and squirmed; it was like he was afraid you were going to disappear again. The next day, they went under the Fidelius Charm and..."

Harry glared at the tabletop for a full minute before meeting Sirius' eyes. "Those marks," he said as he pushed the sleeve of his robe up. "Did they look anything like this?" He laid his bare left arm out on the table and Sirius watched in amazement as pale, opalescent runes glittered to life on the thin skin of Harry's wrist.

Sirius licked his chapped lips. "Yes." He didn't want to pry any further, but his insatiable curiosity prodded him for more. "Where did those come from?"

His godson smiled, baring straight, white teeth, canines unsettlingly sharp. "Probably from the same place as the originals."

He knew he had pushed his luck far enough. At thirteen years old, Harry possessed enough presence to cow the Pope into compliance and a stare that could freeze Niagara. Sirius kept his mouth shut.

For a minute.

"What happens after you catch Wormtail?" Sirius contemplated chewing his tongue into a bloody pulp the next time he got the urge to open his mouth and ask asinine questions.

His godson rubbed a hand over his face; skin drawing tense and tight around the bones of his face. "Well, for one thing, I'd like to find out who chased him out of Cairo."

Sirius paused at Harry's words. Took an idle sip of his drink and glanced at his godson over the rim of the tankard.

"No, it wasn't me," Harry said with a self-depreciating grin. "Wormtail had left not an hour before I got there and I doubt he's going to show up anywhere in human form for the next month. I want to kick myself for not using the Time-Turner sooner, but I didn't dare use it twice when I'd already used it to flip back to that time."

_'How the hell did you get your hands on a Time-Turner?'_ lay on the tip of Sirius' tongue. He swallowed the question back down along with all of the other burgeoning queries crowding his throat.

"The place was trashed where the bastard had been staying," his godson continued. "Dead body on the front doorstep, building stinking of dark magic and garbage and his rooms were almost completely destroyed.

"And get this," Harry said, pointing a finger at him like a Muggle gun. "One the residents saw Wormtail's buddy as he was leaving. Described him as tall, thin, and yellow-haired, very pale with light-coloured eyes and freckles. They said that the man looked strange, had a serious case of the cuckoo crazycakes and possessed an involuntary twitch that looked a bit like a sneer."

The fuzzy memory of an old case file James had worked as an Auror drifted to the fore of Sirius' mind. "I know him," he said. "I can't tell you who it is, but I know I've encountered that description before."

His godson watched him thoughtfully; face blank of everything save mild concern. "If you remember anything else – "

"I'll let you know," Sirius assured him.

Harry reached into a battered-looking rucksack Sirius hadn't noticed before and pulled out a slim volume bound in dark leather. "I recovered this from the remains of his flat. Does it look at all familiar to you?"

Sirius took the book. He couldn't read the worn, embossed cover. The words had been rubbed away by countless pairs of hands and the only thing left were the ornate curls of the first and last letters of the title. There was the heavy thunderstorm smell of dark magic on its pages; the book's plain leather bindings were marred on the corners with something that looked suspiciously like old blood.

The title page was ripped out as well. But from what Sirius could tell as he flipped through the hand-inked pages, the book seemed to be a history and record of famous dark artefacts, full of theories, rumours and lovingly recreated drawings of the fabled objects.

"This is one of the books I lent Lily."

Harry let out a huff of soft laughter. "Mind if I keep a hold of it for a bit?"

Sirius shook his head and handed the book back. "Not at all. I'd wager that Lily was the first to read it in over half a century. Help yourself – I'd only dump it back in the library and forget about it."

"Thanks."

Harry glanced at his watch, prompting Sirius to ask, "Not that I'm ungrateful for what you're doing, but let's be honest here: how long will it be before Pettigrew is in custody of the Aurors?"

"He's a wily little bastard," said Harry, shrugging his shoulders. "Might be one month, might be two. Might be tomorrow afternoon. I don't know. I've devoted all of my spare time to running him down, but I don't have a lot to show for it."

_'That's comforting,'_ Sirius thought, wondering if he should be trusting a task so important to his murderous thirteen year old godson. Not like he had much of a choice in the end.

"My next step," said Harry. "Is to ask... a colleague of mine a favour. One of his grunts is a real whiz with tracking charms. I recovered some blood from Pettigrew's flat so I run a fifty-fifty chance of tracking down either him or our new friend. I'm guessing if I find one, I'll probably find the other close by."

"And then after that?"

"I turn him in to Madame Bones, clear your name, restore your assets. And after that... well, that's up to you. What do you want to do with your freedom?"

He said it like he hadn't expected anything from Sirius, like it was only a simple question. Sirius knew better. Nobody went as far as Harry did for nothing. Not an orphan working to clear his godfather's name.

Did Harry want him to be his guardian? Merlin! Just the idea alone chilled his skin worse than if he'd taken a dip in the North Sea. If this was how Harry was at thirteen, than how bad would he be at fourteen? Fifteen? Sixteen? _Twenty?_

The more he thought about that night, the more Sirius came to realize that Harry _hadn't_ been cruel. Cold and callous, yes. Not cruel. _Efficient._ Driven. Damn all that got in his way. He'd been sending those that came after him and Sirius a message: Fuck with me and I will fuck you over. And maybe, just maybe, you might live to regret that.

Bellatrix would have tortured the squad leader. Harry hadn't. He'd gotten his information and left. End of story.

Harry wanted acceptance, wanted a family that wouldn't treat him a shitty as Petunia and her ilk.

God help him, Sirius didn't want a damn thing to do with the boy.

He managed to smile, grappling with self-hatred at the rising hope on Harry's face. "I think I'd like to reconnect with my godson and maybe be a family again."

Harry smiled. It was smaller, but no less bright than the fierce hunter's grin of before. This one was genuine, happy and _trusting_, reminding him that above all else, Harry was still his godson. Sirius felt a sick twist of regret in his stomach at his deliberate deception, both hating and doubting himself and not sure which was worse.

* * *

Tatarus, the pub that hid the entrance to the black markets, was located at the end of a series of run-down flats right next to the remains of a Roman aqueduct. Someone had charmed the aqueduct to run with fresh water, a trickling stream falling into a wide flat cistern below. A heavy curtain of ivy hung from the aqueduct, green vines tumbling down onto the side of the squat, little pub. Hidden under the leaves were a series of tiny, mewling mouths, sharp teeth stained brown with sticky poison. Half of the vines were tinged a rusty red; some drunken schmooze had already wandered into the serpentine tangle of ivy, the rustling vines winding themselves around a limp hand as it disappeared from view.

Yellow light lit the cobblestones as the door to the pub swung open, spilling a shabby-looking wizard out onto the street. Not breaking his stride, Harry stepped over the moaning form and into the pub.

Seventeen small, round tables were haphazardly arranged through Tatarus' front room, Harry's head almost brushing the low ceiling. Packed full, the noise damn near beat out the smell for intensity. Dodging drunken patrons, Harry made his way over to the bar, trying not to step on too many trailing robes.

The bartender sneered at his approach and straightened the little gold spectacles sitting on the end of his flat, feline nose. The goblin's name was Ripper, and he was the ugliest son of bitch Harry had ever seen. Tufts of sandy brown hair grew out of his pointed ears like bushy pigtails and a long scar passed from the end of his eyebrow up into the spiky fur covering Ripper's scalp. Great, golden plugs hung in his ears like those of the Mayan rulers of old.

Black eyes regarded him balefully as Harry removed a wrapped package the size of his fist from the rucksack.

"I'm looking for Strome," Harry said calmly, laying his left hand on the counter.

Ripper dropped the rag he'd been wiping the bar with in a heap over the package. "Yeah? What do you want with him?" he grumbled. "Make it quick cuz'. I've got customers waiting."

"Just an old colleague looking for a drink and a bit of company," Harry replied.

The goblin's eyes flickered down to the spider-shaped scar on the side of Harry's hand. "He's upstairs." Ripper glanced over Harry's shoulder before leaning closer. "Watch yourself. He's been in a right foul mood today," said the goblin.

Harry nodded and stepped back, an irritable witch jostling him as she pushed past him to the bar.

The same stairs that led to the limestone caverns of the black markets also went to the private rooms upstairs.

A square table crammed into the corner held the only light, a fat candle burning low, wax melting in a wide puddle around the base. Shadows crawled over the heavy buttresses of the ceiling and through the grimy window, Harry could see the moon sitting low and near full in the sky.

The vampire was nowhere to be seen.

"Well, this is appropriately dreary," Harry muttered. The raised hairs on the back of his neck told him the vampire was still in the room. "I thought you hated clichés, old boy."

"I do," said Strome from behind him. "Why you feel compelled to make me into one, I will never know."

Harry frowned. Strome rarely played tricks like this. "I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about, but I'll assume it has something to do with your pithy temperament tonight," Harry replied, walking over to the table and dropping into the other chair.

Strome's dark eyes shone like orange lamplights in the gloom, _tapetum lucidum_ reflecting the faint ambiance from the candle-flame. "What do you want?" he said remaining motionless, aggression writ in the stiffness of his shoulders.

Julius Strome was a class A grouch, but never this skittish. In fact, Harry could remember being smacked upside the head more than once when he was younger for mouthing off to Strome.

"I'd like to make some money," said Harry, realizing that Strome had every intention of attacking him if he didn't get down to business soon. Reaching down into the rucksack, Harry withdrew a package as long as his forearm and quite a bit thicker. He cut the ties holding the oilskin closed and carefully unrolled the cloth to reveal the dull, ivory gleam of a Basilisk fang, a much larger version of what he'd handed the goblin.

The vampire drew closer to the table, a thin, dishevelled figure dressed in black, his sable hair loose from its ties like he'd been running his hands through it all night. He looked as gaunt as Sirius and just as ragged. "Get out," said Strome in a low rumble of displeasure, ire twisting his handsome face into a fanged snarl.

Harry moved his hand to drape over his left arm, ready to draw his wand if needed. "Why are you angry?"

Strome pinned him with a dark glare. "Do you know how often I have arrogant fools like you claiming to have _real _Basilisk remains? I would let you gut me, mount me and bugger me in my own blood before I'd let you sell me this drivel."

The Basilisk tooth sat between them like a bullet between two gunfighters. The pub's tumultuous patrons crowed rowdily beneath them and the sounds of breaking glass told Harry that a brawl had broken out.

"Why don't you test them, Julius?" Harry ground out irritably.

"Why don't you make it worth my time, _Mal_?" Julius replied using a mocking note on the name Harry had given him their previous meeting. Something in the way the vampire bared his teeth, flicker-quick like a predator, set Harry's nerves on edge.

He smiled back, wrapping an iron fist around the flyaway edges of his temper. "It's Mr. Greene today. I can cut you in on the profits if you like," said Harry lightly. "A nice round number, no? Maybe 20% and for you to keep an eye on who you sell them to? I'd hate for something this powerful to end up in the wrong hands."

"Flattering, Mr. Greene. But I will need more than money if I am to swallow this bullshit, hook, line and sinker."

Harry damn near growled in reply, pleasant smile becoming strained. "What else could I possibly entice you with?"

Strome's lips curled. "I'm rich, immortal and good-looking. I sincerely doubt," he said, looking Harry over. " - that you possess anything worth my time."

Harry kept his expression carefully neutral. "I'm sorry, are my tits not perky enough for you?" he said, struggling to keep his voice bored and blank of the fury coursing through his veins. He couldn't remember Strome ever being this difficult before. Prickly and ill-tempered – sure. But not hateful. And certainly not this close to outright hostility.

The vampire's expression flickered with disgust. "Your crudities are not amusing."

"And neither is your shitty disposition. You are not my only option, Julius."

Silence reigned again. When Strome made no move to explain himself, Harry gathered the Basilisk fang back into its cloth bundle and turned away from the table.

A strong hand clamped down over his left wrist. Heat and pain scored his skin and Harry nearly passed out at the shock of foreign magic coursing through him.

He wrenched his arm away, dropping the pack at his feet, fang rolling away with a clatter. The spider-shaped mark between Harry's thumb and forefinger shone a vivid red and black in the dim lighting of the pub.

Anger twisted Strome's features before washing clean. "Where did you get that mark?" His voice was low and deep and it shook with rage.

"What the fuck, Strome?" Harry stared incredulously at him. "Is _that_ what this is about?"

The vampire bared his teeth at him. "It has my signature all over it," he hissed, an orange spark flaring to life in his eyes. "Where did you get that mark?"

Harry had stupidly forgotten Strome's gifts of Truthtelling and the answer tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop it. "You gave it to me."

Strome's nostrils flared and Harry prepared himself to go toe to toe with an old friend.

Then the sable-haired vampire stilled, breathed deep, and sat down in his chair with a sigh.

"I would know if I had met you before," said Strome, tone even and smooth, eyes emptying of bloodlust, that hungry black rage sinking back beneath their surface. "And I sincerely hope that you wouldn't believe me fool enough to buy your half-baked story, Hadrian Sharr."

Harry tried not to swallow his tongue. He stared flatly at the vampire and didn't move. "Word travels quickly."

Strome's mouth curled into a smile that didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "_That_ it does."

Harry let out a slow breath, composing himself for another tangled web of half-truths and insinuations. "I was sixteen when you gave me the mark. Some might say it was too young, but for the times I was living in, I wonder if it was too late. Never did me much good, always got me into more trouble than it did out."

Which was true enough. The black markets held a wealth of information – for the right price. At the time, there were enough dark artefacts left over from Grimmauld Place that Harry hadn't truly considered the price of the information. It was only when he ran out of options that he started taking miscellaneous jobs from the people he owed money to; not that he cared too much about it then, not as long as Death Eaters were still dying and Harry could keep picking them off.

A very slippery slope indeed. It was probably one of the people he'd worked for that had betrayed him to the Ministry; an early morning knock on his door by a squad of Aurors and then suddenly he'd been one of England's most notorious serial killers. Which was the whole damn reason _why_ he'd gotten dragged into the DoM's Special Forces in the first place. It hadn't stopped him from killing Death Eaters, but the Ministry had slept easier knowing they held the other end of his leash.

Harry felt sick just thinking about it.

Strome made no move to speak; he stared back at Harry unblinking, dark eyes giving nothing away. It was the oldest trick in the book, making an opponent carry the entire conversation in hopes of them dropping more information than they intended.

"You would not have known me as Hadrian Sharr," Harry continued, meeting Strome's stare as he built high walls in his mind, dancing circles around the compulsion Strome projected. "In truth, I was as exactly as I appeared – young, stupid, and desperate. I'm sure that if you could remember me, you would probably be very pleased with how much you've made off my ignorance."

The vampire blinked, long and slow, a wide smile beginning to stretch across his face. He laughed. "You are full of more shite than a politician on election day, Master Sharr. That is a very good story, but still, a story."

Harry got up from his chair, furious at himself for giving so much away for nothing in return. He should have learned his lesson the first hundred times it happened. Too fucking trusting.

"Sit, I didn't mean that in anything but jest." Strome reached down by his chair and picked up a bottle of firewhiskey. "I can tell you are young by how hot your blood runs," said the vampire, taking a drink.

Eyeing Strome warily, Harry picked up the discarded fang and sank down into the chair.

The vampire seemed amused. "I will accept your story – for now. But each time we meet, as I am certain this will _not_ be our last, I want you to tell me at least one truth," said Strome, holding up his index finger. "One _truth_ about yourself. No misdirection, no lies, no weasel-words. I will know if you are trying to guide me astray."

"Why?" Harry asked incredulously. "The first thing you taught me was misdirection. Said that I was too honest."

Strome shook his head. "There are a thousand easier ways in which you might access my domain." He held out a hand, gesturing for Harry to extend his own.

The second thing Julius had taught him was how to read eyes. Body language could be masked. But if you knew what to look for, it didn't matter how good you were – the eyes gave it away every time. The vampire's eyes were cautious, assessing and under it all was the insatiable curiosity that led Strome to create such an _extensive_ underground information empire.

Harry extended his left hand. The vampire took it and pulled an odd pair of onyx-rimmed glasses from his pocket, looking much like a studious young scholar with those curious spectacles perched on the end of his nose, not out of place in a library or classroom. Strome murmured something low in a tongue Harry didn't recognize and colour flooded into the mark. The vampire nodded to himself as he studied the tiny black widow etched into Harry's skin.

Strome sat back in his chair, cool and calloused fingers releasing Harry's hand.

"There are a thousand easier ways to access my domain," he repeated, tucking the glasses away. "You've managed to go about it the long way around. This mark is no secret shortcut, Master Sharr."

"I'm assuming you'll elaborate on that," Harry replied with a curl to his lip, expression mulish as he rubbed at the still vividly coloured mark.

"You carry my personal, self-made identification spell and yet you know nought of what you bear? If I trusted you enough to bestow this little _gift_ upon you, then I was grooming you to be one of my spies." The words were quiet and cool, almost without inflection and Harry knew from the sound of the vampire's voice, Strome was winding up into his sales pitch.

"My cat's paw. My eyes and ears into the world, my hands when _I_ could not acquire what I desired. Plausible deniability is a beautiful thing. You could go where I could not and no questions would be asked."

Sitting back from the table, Harry crossed his arms and studied the vampire's guileless face. Over four hundred years of experience made Strome a frighteningly believable actor. "You meant to make me into a thief."

"A _great_ thief." The vampire smiled, not an ounce of guilt showing on his mien. "What better to do with your skill at changing faces; at slipping through the shadows unseen? Work as an Auror?" Strome laughed. "You would have been miserable. Paperwork and desk jockeying is not for you. A mercenary? You are too crafty – your talents wasted as an aimless killing machine. A soldier? You are too fiercely independent. You will never be content to live as somebody else's blunt little instrument."

Harry tried not to laugh. For someone who was so adept at reading people, Strome was way off his game today if he though Harry was interested in buying his PR bullshit. "And nobody else but you would be good enough to serve?"

He'd never been so stupid as to naively believe the vampire was helping him out of the goodness of his heart. But this was bugfuck crazy even for Strome. 'Course, the vampire probably had Hadrian Sharr's Ministry file squirreled away somewhere, his skills and attributes well memorized. Hard to lie to someone who knew 'you' better than you did.

The vampire scoffed. "Don't be insulting. This is a business relationship, not a military institution. I benefit, you benefit, and we all go home happy."

Harry wanted to press the heel of his hand into the throbbing pulse between his eyes, to scrub at his face and shake his head until the pain went away.

But he didn't dare show any weakness in front of Strome. The vampire would seize upon the opportunity to manipulate Harry into giving him what he wanted – whatever he wanted. Strome always did play his cards close to his chest.

"Why do you want me to work for you – "

Strome gave him an offended sneer.

"Work _with_ you," Harry amended, knowing he was way too old to be rolling his eyes at Strome's ridiculous antics. "Why do you want me to work _with_ you, so badly? What can I possibly offer you that you can't obtain from somebody else?"

"How much of your story was unadulterated truth?" the vampire countered.

"Everything I told you was true – I simply didn't tell you all of it. When you came across me, I'd just lost the last of my family and I was a _ticking time bomb waiting to go off_. Which you should already know since you've read my file," Harry replied, straining to clear his voice of the irritation bubbling so near the surface. "I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt Voldemort the way he'd hurt me, strip away everything from him, his followers, informants, sympathizers, and assets."

Harry licked at the chapped spot on his lip where the skin was beginning to split and grinned, laughter slipping out in a soft, scoffing huff. "You were my best option."

"Why?" asked the vampire. "Out of all your, no-doubt, _extensive_ options, why would you choose me? The lowliest of the low – a smuggler and a thief?"

"You demanded the least sacrifice," Harry replied, turning Strome's past actions over in his mind. '_You weren't another __megalomaniacal__ douchebag with a shitty childhood and delusions of grandeur – you've always had your own agenda – but you didn't want a servant or a mindless drone,' _he thought.

"You found me wandering around on Knockturn in a daze. Remarked on how lucky I was not to have been killed for my stupidity. At the time, I was flying higher than a kite on a pretty potent mix of absinthe and morphine – I don't even remember how I got my hands on that. I'd just killed for the first time. Didn't even know what to do with myself afterwards."

Raising an eyebrow, the vampire replied, "And it was as simple as you say? Me, stumbling across you by accident?"

Harry was startled into laughter. "I mistakenly believed you wanted to eat me. You laughed and said that I would make a poor meal for even the starved and desperate." He shook his head. "This was such a long time ago. Long enough that my memories are starting to become blurry. I only knew you for a little over a year. After that, I lost contact with you and all of my other informants until just a few months ago."

"Now _that_ I doubt." Strome leaned forward, bracing his forearm across his knee. "I would never let such a promising student out of my sight for that long."

Harry shrugged. "I was arrested."

"And spent over a decade in Azkaban," said Strome, a mocking note entering his voice. "Do share with me, Mr. Black, all the details of your _miraculous_ escape."

The skin on the back of Harry's neck went cold. "That's not funny."

"Of course it is. You simply _hate_ being laughed at, which tells me a lot more about yourself than anything you've shared so far."

Harry couldn't help the derisive sneer that crossed his face at the vampire's taunting jeer. "At the time of my arrest, I had a standing warrant on my head for forty-eight accounts of culpable homicide, destruction of personal property, use of the Unforgivables, aiding and abetting known criminals – there were a few other things, but those are the ones I remember. Forgive me for failing to let you know about my change in plans."

Strome smiled. "Guilty as charged?" the vampire drawled.

He refused to feel cowed by Strome's sneering sarcasm. "All that and more."

"Reckless, incautious, and careless." The vampire clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "I'm disappointed in you if that was all you could do with my teachings."

"I was _sixteen_," Harry bit out, leaning forward in his chair and planting both hands on the edge of the table. "I hadn't a clue what I was doing. My technique has improved since then."

"Liar, liar, pants on fire," purred Strome. "If _any_ of the rumours surrounding your sudden... _re-_appearance are true, then we need to have a little talk about your methods."

Gritting his teeth, Harry continued. "I didn't get back in touch with you because I was conscripted into Special Forces. Our association would have hurt both of us."

"Then why have you chosen to contact me now? I have no interest in being caught up in the Ministry's sweaty grasp."

"I have a new handler," Harry said with a shrug. "He's given me a lot more freedom than usual. I'm not fond of the situation, but this way I can still sneak about under the Ministry's nose with their own permission."

"Why do I not remember any of this?" Strome narrowed his eyes at Harry. "I don't like having my mind poked and prodded, my secrets wiped from memory."

Harry shook his head, feeling agitated and exhausted with all of the old memories being stirred from their slumber. "I can't tell you that."

"Can't? Or won't?" Strome said with what could have been a smile if it weren't for the derision in his voice.

"Won't," Harry replied unabashedly.

Strome's mouth flickered into a frown before it replaced itself with his usual smile, the kind of smirk that was so slippery, a used-car salesman would turn green with jealousy. Harry could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen that smile directed towards himself.

"You are the most honest liar I've ever met, Master Sharr," said Strome. The vampire bowed at the waist from his chair. "It would be my honour to work with you and your... _resources_," he said as he spotted the basilisk hide peeking out of Harry's knapsack. "I can only hope to do the best I can to help you in return."

Harry despised being mocked and the opportunity to dig under the vampire's skin was too tempting to ignore. "Well," he drew out, affecting a dim note in his voice. "I could use a new pair of boots."

Strome's snake-oil salesman smile grew strained. "You have a complete, well-preserved pelt of one of the most invaluable beasts on the market and you want a pair of _shoes_."

"I can tell you're not impressed," Harry replied, an insouciant smile spread ear to ear.

Nostrils flaring, his smile turning into a grimace, the vampire bit out, "Give me three weeks to find you a buyer. I'll see about drafting a poisoner for turning the teeth into usable ingredients. Where do you wish me to deposit the profits?"

"My Gringotts accounts are still being monitored by the Ministry. I know you have several accountants on your payroll – "

Strome interrupted him. "For an extra ten percent, I can set up a secure vault in the Swiss branch, no questions asked."

_'Gotcha.'_

"Five percent," Harry retorted. "At ten, it'd be cheaper to ask the Malfoys' solicitor for a favour."

"Make it seven and I'll be happy to throw in an alias that will let you ghost through the Ministry's dragnets, sight unseen."

"Full paperwork?" Harry asked.

Smugness radiated off the vampire. "Everything you'd need to start a new life."

"Done." Harry had no intention of using an alias with Julius Strome's strings attached to it, but he'd gotten the anonymous account needed to slip by his invisible watchers. The vampire could think what he wanted about the rest.

"You know, I never asked why you chose a spider for your mark," Harry said as he emptied the knapsack out on the wooden table, a quarter of the basilisk's remains from the Chamber of Secrets spread across its worn, spell-scarred surface.

Strome's amicable smile never changed. "I am, but a tiny arachnid, clinging to the webs of time."

"Why the black widow then? If I remember my lore correctly, she's been used as a symbol of death in the wizarding world since the early 1500s."

For a moment, something ancient and hungry stared out at Harry from Julius' gaze, eyes flaring wholly orange and animalistic. When the vampire spoke, the words rang out slow and heavy with age, a sense of dustiness and a patient, ever-vigilant malignance making the air sit thick in Harry's lungs, lead weights attached to every breath he took. "Master Sharr, I've been around for a very long time. There are few who know death better than I."

The weight of Strome's words followed Harry down the stairs.

Nothing like having a 600 year old vampire tell you that your methods sucked, your ambitions sucked, _you_ sucked, and that you failed at life in general to keep you humble.

Irony sucked fucking donkey dick.

She also had a really shitty sense of humour.

Which is why when Harry realized he'd picked up a tail, he found himself recognizing the persistent motherfucker.

Sandy-haired, and of average height, Morticus could have been handsome if it weren't for his unfortunate beak of a nose. He had the rolling stride of someone well at ease with his own abilities and the steady light in his cornflower-blue eyes spoke of his long years of experience. Dressed as he was in nondescript greys and blacks, it was almost impossible to pick him out of the shadows of Knockturn Alley.

Morticus Calloway was a Death Eater. He also worked for the Department of Mysteries.

Morticus was too much of a loose cannon to be recruited into Special Forces, too quick to shoot first and ask questions later. Special Forces liked a thinking man's serial killer. Mort was the kind of guy who did better under exact orders rather than a flexible set of guidelines and goals. Not exactly the kind of guy who thought for himself – too straightforward and inflexible to changes in his environment. He did what he was told, nothing more, and nothing less.

He did, however, work for Mission Operatives as an agent – which explained why he was so damn hard to get rid of last time around. The man was already on the inside and able to stay one step ahead of Harry until the Ministry fell.

By the very fact that Mort was here, Harry knew someone else had sent the crazy SOB after him.

_Notgoodnotgoodnotgood…_

Harry took a sharp left turn down a narrow alleyway that opened up into a different, much more crowded area of Knockturn. Slipped past a series of candle-lit stalls decorated with shrunken heads, chicken's feet and dangling snake skins, painted bone-charms by the handful packed into shallow baskets next to potions in radioactive greens, violets, and reds scattered across the countertops; he fell into step with a cluster of scruffy day-labourers just beginning to feel the touch of inebriation. A small, round mirror hanging from one of the stalls showed Mort's sandy-hair bobbing through the crowd behind Harry at a steady pace.

The cobblestone pathway widened a bit and began to slope downhill as it reached a circular courtyard at the end of the street. Preparations for the upcoming Sabbat of Mabon at the Fall Equinox were in full swing. Harry pulled the hood of his robes over his head to hide the distinctive shine of his hair and continued to follow the crowd around the stagnant fountain in the middle of the courtyard. Unlike the Ministry's ode to pureblood ideals, this one was a tier of three simple stone bowls, more of the same toothy ivy choking the last trickle of water from the fountain.

Murky water rippled and a thing with spines like a porcupine and a dorsal fin like a sea serpent writhed near the surface.

Mort was still following him. Harry briefly considered pushing Morticus into the fountain and taking off during the ensuing chaos.

Rounding a cart piled high with apples, he quickened his pace towards a small, wrought iron gate pinched between two tall brick tenements out of the way of the festivities. The gate was easy enough to hop over and finally out of sight, Harry took off down the dark narrow path at a dead sprint.

Knockturn Alley rivalled Daedalus' Labyrinth for random chaos and complexity, three thousand years of dark magic steeped into its bones. Its streets and walkways changed faster than the famous staircases of Hogwarts' hallowed halls. One moment, you might be walking down a wide, cobblestone street in the mid-morning rain and a left turn later, you'd better run as fast as fucking possible as the dark alleyway collapsed into nothingness behind you, a murder of crows screaming their glee to the night sky above. So when Harry popped back out onto the main street from the narrow walkway, he wasn't that surprised, hoping that the path decided to deposit Morticus elsewhere.

It hadn't.

He was never that lucky.

Across the busy street was a clothier's shop, the front display swathed in velvet the colour of spilt wine. Harry was through the door, bell jingling merrily, past the racks of elegant wizarding couture and out the back before the startled saleswitch had time to shriek.

The back door led to a series of narrow stairs winding around between a tall, moss-covered wall and the wrought-iron bars of someone's tiny garden. His boots tap-tap-tapped the stones in rapid stutter-steps as he hurtled downward, skidding slightly at the turns.

_Move it! Move it! Move it!_

The steps ended in the tall face of a building, a sheer, implacable wall of stone looming above him. Somewhere behind him were the steady sounds of footfalls.

Harry didn't stop to think. Casting a quick disillusionment charm, he grabbed hold of the metal drainpipe, strong fingers finding firm handholds in the stout brackets as he hauled himself upward.

Mort rounded the corner just as Harry reached somebody's second-story window. Harry stifled a grunt as he swung himself over to the window ledge, perching like a gargoyle on the edge of the sill, one hand braced above him to keep from tumbling out of the frame.

Blue sharpshooter's eyes scanned the small alley. Mort had his wand out as he turned in a slow circle, the end glowing chartreuse green as he directed it over the surrounding area.

Harry had never before regretted not learning how to disapparate more than now. He'd never needed it before he died, not with all of the trace networks and anti-apparation barriers in place. It'd been suicidal to even try those last seven, almost eight years of the war. Now, though, now with the beginning drizzle of ice cold rain and the steady regard of the DoM agent below, Harry really fucking wished he knew the trick of flinging oneself through space and time.

He needed to move before the sill became too damp to crawl out of.

Mort began to back out of the alley, mouth pinched into a dark frown.

Pulling a small knife from his boot, Harry wedged the thin blade into the lip of the window. Most windows in this area of Knockturn were of the simple pin and slot variety. Given enough leverage and the window would simply pop out of the frame and fall to the floor. It was a damn good thing that logic wasn't a strong point with most wizards or Harry would have been fried by the multitude of wards placed on the windowpanes to prevent breakage and burglary.

Senses humming from the warded glass, Harry jiggled the blade, pushing the knife further under the window.

The rattle of metal on metal must have caught Mort's ears, because Harry watched Mort's reflection in the window whirl around, eyes furious and damn near spitting sparks.

Spellfire splashed off the top of the windowsill.

"Fuck it!" Harry snarled and forced the blade down, popping the window from its frame. The glass shattered against the floor, wards glittering and beginning to form spindly red fingers to grasp at Harry's robes. The smell of burnt cotton wafted up where the fingers touched cloth, the wards dispelling his disillusionment charm. Harry dove through the opening as a killing curse soared over his head.

Tucking himself into a ball, Harry hit the dusty floor in a controlled roll. As soon as his feet touched ground, Harry was through the bedroom door. Cobwebs and musty carpet greeted him on the other side, everything washed out from the murky haze peeking through the windows. Harry ran to the end of the hallway, placed one hand on the banister and jumped.

The **whump** of impact throbbed through his shins and calves, Mort's wordless snarl following his descent. Knowing the way an operative's mind worked, Harry blasted open the front door, the heavy oak swinging violently on its hinges, and took off for a side room.

Not clever enough, because just as he leapt for the door, a heavy weight came down on his back. The rotted frame splintered under their combined bulk, spilling them out into the room beyond.

Harry hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs, a cloud of dust rising from the moth-eaten rug. Instinct registered movement and Harry rolled out of the way of the incoming curse.

They'd ended in a library of sorts, towering shelves filled with mouldering books and knickknacks. Harry didn't dare take his eyes off of Mort, but from what he could tell, whoever previously owned this collection had a serious fetish for old school Muggle medicine. Elaborate depictions of internal anatomy decorated the walls, making him feel like he'd stumbled into Frankenstein's sitting room. Harry recognized the framed pages of human dissections from the _Fabrica_, muscles flayed from bone rendered in black ink, Rembrandt's painting of a group of curious Dutch scholars huddled over an open corpse, and the hyper-detailed print of _The Clinic of Dr. Gross_ and the brightly lit realism of _The Agnew Clinic_.

Surgical tools were piled on the corner desks, a glint of silver seen through the choking layer of dust. Mort didn't quite flinch, but Harry caught the brief moue of revulsion as it crossed the operative's face.

"Why are you following me?" Harry asked, keeping a careful distance between him and the operative.

"Why aren't you fighting back?" Mort replied, keeping a wary eye on Harry's crouched form.

Harry grinned, noting how Mort avoided looking him directly in the eye, choosing instead to stare at the bridge of his nose. Someone had informed him that Harry was a talented Legilmencer, which gave away more than the operative thought. Training against Legilimency should have been standard procedure – and was when Harry was initially recruited – but standards seemed to have gotten lax in the mellower years after the First War. Good to know Mort was still on the up and up.

"I don't have to, shithead," Harry remarked conversationally. "You've been throwing out Killing Curses all willy-nilly which means within the next thirty seconds, this place is going to be crawling with Aurors."

From the next room over came a resounding crash and the words: _"This is the Ministry of Magic! Drop your wands on the ground now and put your hands behind your head!"_

"Coward!" Morticus spat.

Three things happened at once. A burly, red-robed Auror appeared in the doorway and fired a stunner at Mort, who ducked, while throwing another Killing Curse at Harry. A hastily summoned bust from one of the bookshelves intercepted the curse, marble shrapnel exploding everywhere. The Auror was dead within a breath, a Columbian necktie smiling red and wet on his throat.

A long heavy oak table sat in between Harry and Mort. While the operative's back was still turned, Harry stood, and in the same movement, kicked the table such vicious force that it slammed into Mort's ribs.

Mort stumbled with a snarl, elbowing striking the table hard enough to throw his aim off, green light flashing past Harry.

Too slow.

Harry snatched up a pair of books from the floor, flinging both at Mort, who blasted the first from the air, but wasn't fast enough to catch the second. It clipped him on the side of the skull; just enough to knock him back a step, one hand reaching out to brace himself on the table.

Way too fucking slow.

Side-stepping a concussion hex, Harry darted towards the operative, jabbing his wand at the bookcase behind Mort.

The operative never saw it coming.

The bookcase folded in half, the sides coming together with a **snap** and **crunch** on Mort's wand-arm.

Mort howled, his lips peeled back in a grimace of pain and fury. The bookcase exploded.

Harry ducked the wooden shrapnel, ash clouding the air and fired off a pair of evisceration hexes into the mess. Green light flashed out of the haze, scorching the floor at Harry's feet.

Three quick strides took him round the length of the table, footprints smeared into the filth on the floor. Through the dust, Mort scrambled to his feet, the trilling murmur of a healing charm falling from his mouth.

He'd gotten Mort's wand-arm. Special operatives were trained to be ambidextrous, but suffering a broken hand in a non-practice environment was a rare injury and everyone had their natural preference.

And field medicine was only so good. The bone would still be fragile.

Pale blue light arced towards Mort, painting the rubble around him with ice as the operative scurried away. Harry slapped the bone-breaker out of his path with his wand, Mort's hex ricocheting away into one of the bookshelves with the shattering tinkle of some porcelain knickknack. Green light flashed past Harry again, a second killing curse hidden in its wake.

A trio of surgical instruments flew up to intercept the curse.

They detonated in a blast of shrapnel flying off in all directions, steel edges red and sizzling as they bounced off of Harry's shield. He banished the metal shrapnel at the operative, now close enough to seize Mort's wrist before he could get another spell off. Harry twisted the wand away from him, striking the operative across the temple with a series of quick rabbit punches, and broke the hand again for good measure.

Mort tried twisting out of Harry's grip, tried hauling Harry's bulk over his shoulder and onto the floor, but Harry was bigger this time, a lot bigger than when he last encountered an operative and Mort was too disoriented to dislodge him. The small blade was in Harry's hand again, light as a feather and razor-sharp.

Then it was in Mort's gut, blood gushing hot and wet over Harry's hand.

More loud voices in the other room, footsteps coming down the hall…

Mort gasped, broken hand flailing at the air.

It didn't take much to dislocate his trapped arm, body beginning to flop like a landed fish in Harry's hold, blade sinking in deep enough that Harry could feel where warm flesh split open around the weapon. He yanked the knife out, wound yawning like a little red mouth.

It didn't take much to kick Mort's knees out from under him.

It took even less to place one hand under his jaw, another behind his head and twist.

The slight click of Mort's neck breaking was too quiet to catch over the sound of Aurors apparating in.

Harry was through the window and running down the adjacent alleyway before the Aurors even reached the old library.

Self-defence was hardly a crime.

* * *

The Portkey dropped him a healthy mile into the Forbidden Forest's outer boundaries, not far from one of the many passages into Hogwarts.

Harry lay sprawled on the damp cushion of dead leaves, dazed from vertigo as he watched the night sky swirl above him.

He counted his breaths in and out, in and out, deep and thick, little puffs of condensation misting up in front of his mouth, more than aware of the heady thrum of blood in his veins. What was left of the adrenaline rush had turned into a sleepy languor running under his skin; too warm in his heavy robes, he felt light-headed and somewhat buzzed.

Leaves crinkling in his grasp, Harry tilted his head back, eyes closed and arms flung wide to stop the tremor of the ground beneath him. Opening his eyes would cause his vision to swim and would generally be a wasted effort.

God, he hated Portkeys.

Instead, he lay there, almost insensate with dizziness, trying his best to listen for other predators.

He should have felt afraid. The copse of trees surrounding him were dense, packed thick with oaks so old it would take three people to wrap their arms around the trunks, the knotting branches intertwining close enough to deter most of the forest's larger inhabitants. There was a perfect circle in the centre of the grove that he'd only spotted due to luck and a keen eye while flying overhead in his scouting – why he'd chosen this location in the first place.

His breathing calmed and he rolled over onto his hands and knees with a sigh, wet leaves clinging to his robes. Harry brushed them off and gazed around, rolling his shoulders to relieve a crick in his neck.

A sickle moon sat high in the night sky, lending just enough light to see the trees. The woods were lonely and old, time and his voyages through Hell taming the sinister nature of the trees to something pensive and subdued. Their shoulders slumped with age, their heads bowed in apology, the branches drooped more than he remembered of his jaunts through the Forest in his schoolboy years. They were less like angry talons reaching for him and more like ordinary trees, unconcerned with the transient nature of humankind.

Something skittered across the dead foliage on the ground, something small and probably furry and Harry glanced up with disinterest. A pair of eyes blinked back at him, the copper shine of a night-dwelling animal's gaze glittering like tiny lamps in the distinct lack of light.

"Shoo fly, don't bother me," Harry murmured, sitting back on his heels. "I wouldn't make a very good meal for you."

"Mrrrow," agreed the animal. It slunk toward Harry, purring as it butted its head against his knees. He scratched it behind the ears, recognizing the little brown calico as one of the cats he'd stumbled over a few times in Gryffindor tower.

Harry stood, keeping a wary eye on the cat weaving in and out of his ankles. "Trip me up, cat," he muttered. "And I swear to God, I will skin you and wear your carcass as a hat."

The cat purred, keeping pace at ankle-level as Harry slipped between the trees and climbed over thick roots and rocks. He followed the subtle arrows he'd marked the trees with toward the shard of rune-covered granite marking the passage under the Forbidden Forest. Grunting, he shoved the heavy stone aside, the dull scrape of stone on stone louder than he expected. A dark hole opened up in the earth.

Harry lit his wand and dropped through.

Eleven feet down, his boots touched stone. Harry rolled with the impact, coming up into a tall cavern that was once a part of the emergency evacuation route out of Hogwarts. The passage itself had been blocked off by a cave in since Grindelwald's era, but the entrance was a functional drop spot.

Neatly folded on a stone outcropping were his Hogwart's uniform, the holly wand, a pair of glasses, and the beaten metal ring with his "Harry Potter: Clumsy student and part-time hero" glamour attached to it.

Harry wondered how long he'd be able to keep up this Peter Parker Clark Kent costume change bullshit. As if he could put on the glasses and suddenly become a normal boy again – like the world wouldn't notice that Superman was just Clark Kent without the red and blue spandex. He felt like the wolf of Aesop's fable, sewing wool over his fur so that he might hunt among the flock.

"_Pelle sub agnina latitat mens saepe lupina_," Harry murmured.

Under a sheep's skin often hides a wolfish mind.

"Mrow," came the mournful sound from the still open entrance.

"Goddamnit, cat."

The feline didn't look particularly pleased about the levitation charm. But when its feet touched the floor, the cat's parti-coloured tail went up like a happy little flag as the rock doorway **snicked** shut above.

"If you didn't like that part, cat, you'll like the next even less," Harry said out loud to the animal.

He stumbled a bit as he switched clothing, still dizzy from the damn Portkey and the cat underfoot wasn't helping. "Fucking bleeding heart, Potter."

Harry set his yew and thestral hair wand on top of his old robes, weapons stacked to the side, Peter Parker persona firmly in place. Scooping up the cat, Harry waved his Holly wand over a blank piece of rock, dispelling the mild camouflage charm.

A tall mirror shimmered into existence from the stone, the edges unfinished. He knocked twice on the surface.

The mirror rippled.

He stepped through the quicksilver barrier, the warm, purring bundle in his arms turning into a yowling mass of fur as the peculiar sensation of cold water flowed over them both.

"You're welcome for the ride," said Harry as the cat sped around the corner of the fourth floor corridor.

* * *

_Harry dreams of a sad-eyed Grim sitting on the far side of a snowy field, its fur matted with frost, the sky overhead gone grey and sullen. The animal is a small, black splotch on the monochromatic expanse of the field. _

_It's quiet._

_No wind._

_No sleet._

_No snow._

_Hardly even the sound of ice being crushed under his boots or the slow rhythm of his breathing. _

_Nothing's happening – not really._

_They're just two inkblots on a blank page staring at each other, shivering in the snow like its fucking penance or something. _

_When Harry wakes in the morning, it's to a heavy heart and a cold knot in his gut. He'll spend the next hour struggling to remember whom the pair of melancholic grey eyes belong to before giving up on it as just another dream about just another person he never managed to save anyway._

* * *

Miami at night was a riot of colour and sound. Neon in sharp cobalts, oranges, magentas and limes lit up street corners, bars, and the gleam of chrome on expensive cars. It was hot, muggy enough that he felt like he was swimming instead of walking through the moist, soupy Miami heat. But still the young and the restless lined up in front of the clubs, sweating disaffectedly in their glamour and glitz.

The sleek, greyhound lines of the 1939 Lincoln Zephyr idling by the curb seemed wholly out-of-place, a ghost of yesteryear amid the boxy ranks of modern vehicles. Its hood curved up into a metal snout, snarling, distorted, baring the shining teeth of its grille, its windows dark eyes fixed upon the road, the motor a low wuffing growl of an animal that breathed steel and fire.

A man in a red chauffeur's uniform opened the door and Julius Strome slid into the deceptively large interior on luxurious leather seats.

"I hear you've made a new friend," said Jezebel as she ran a casual hand through her short, honey-brown curls. Long-limbed and lovely, the daughter of Julius' Miami colleague could have walked off the face of an haute couture fashion magazine right into the VIP lounge of the clubs outside without rejection.

Heavy bass notes throbbed up through the floor and seats of the Zephyr.

"He's a liar," said Julius, a sneer twisting his face into something less than human as he leaned back into the seat.

"I'm not surprised. Despite your talents of persuasion, honesty is still a rare currency." Jezebel leaned back into the seat, the blue neckline of her dress slipping low enough to show the glitter of a sapphire pendant on a slim chain.

Julius didn't show a flicker of interest.

"He lies so much, he lies even when he believes he's telling the truth. Fed me some bullshit story about finding him when he was a druggie teenager and offering him a job. As if I am _that _altruistic. As if I am _incapable_ of recognizing the kind of man he is. He would never give up control over his own body like that, not to grief, not to circumstance and addiction – he is the kind of man to whom the world is just another dragon to be tamed and he'll sling a leg over that scaly bitch's back and ride her into the ground."

The car pulled away from the hubbub of the clubs without a shift in momentum, the flash of lights outside the only indication that the vehicle was moving.

"Tried to feed me the concept that he's indebted to me," Julius continued. "That he will happily cede control over his own actions to me while using me for his own ends like he thinks I have no idea how quickly he'll discard me when I'm no longer useful. He's a regular con-man; pulling rabbits out of his hat with one hand while he robs me blind with the other."

Jezebel smiled, her glamour charms failing to disguise a mouthful of pointed ivory teeth, or how the passing streetlights skimmed off the leathery shine of snakeskin around the hollows of her cheekbones. "What angers you the most, Julius? That he stole your lines? Or that you wanted to believe them?"

The vampire's lip curled, but he said nothing.

"Admit it. The idea of having a Sharr for a protégé tickles your fancy."

"There are easier ways to kill yourself," Julius muttered irritably.

Jezebel shared a glance with her companion, before turning back to face Strome. "Your history is catching up with you."

"My history doesn't stink of Deep Winter."

Jezebel's companion coughed, the sound of wheezing taking over the conversation.

He was an older man of Latin descent, dark hair threaded through with iron grey, heavy lines carved into the corners of his eyes. "The Sharr Family has always been the Winter Queen's closest confidants," the man rasped. "But your grievance goes deeper than political allegiances. I haven't seen your feathers this ruffled in years."

A pinched look crossed Julius' face. "He is very young," he said after a small silence. "And I see a frightening amount of myself in that angry young man. Somewhere, somehow, we have met. We have met, and we were close. Somewhere, somehow, I was tricked into cuddling a viper to my breast."

Jezebel lifted her hand, drinking from a flute of champagne that had not been there moments before, golden eyes fixed on the vampire.

"You are proud of him," Jezebel murmured. "Furious and humiliated, but proud."

Strome shook his head. "His mind wanders the edge of sanity. I'd give him maybe a year before he plunges all the way over," he said ruefully. "I've never been a fan of insane Dark Lords."

"He tugs on your shrivelled heartstrings, Julius," Jezebel mocked. "I think I should like to meet your friend. He sounds like a man of singularly interesting character."

Her companion coughed again, this time pulling a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, muffling the sound of his laboured breathing in its folds. "Be careful what you wish for, my dear."

Jezebel frowned, the lovely lines of her face going grey and wilted. "Oh Virgil, your cynicism will drive us all into an early grave."

Virgil Gomiraiz, a minor lord of the sixth house of the Lords of Magic, lifted Jezebel's free hand and pressed a paper-dry kiss to the knuckles. He shifted in his seat and a passing streetlight glanced off the golden lapel ornament pinned to his dinner jacket.

In small, exquisite detail lay a black scorpion crossed with a reaper's sickle rendered in gold filigree on a scarlet background.

"What is your motivation in this?" asked Virgil.

The vampire laughed, low and smug. "Do you know how damnably hard it is to kill a necromancer?"

The words caught the attention of his fellow conspirators tight in its grasp, winding bony fingers of suspicion and curiosity about them.

"Little brother was never content to merely cheat Death, he wanted to own it." Julius bared his teeth the way a tiger would after a large meal and a mid-day nap in the sun. "Congratulations would go to my new protégé, I suppose, if he manages to accomplish what I have not. After all, there's no shame in being victorious by proxy."

* * *

If you like Circular Reasoning and other stories of its kind, check out DLP's new C2. With almost two hundred DLP author-approved stories in its archive, this community is a great way to while away the hours in between updates. Look it up – you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Link's in my profile.

Gogogogogo!


	19. Skeleton Hunt III

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

A/N: Instead of Where is Waldo, we're gonna play a short round of Where is the Dresden Files Reference? Thanks go to Voice of the Nephilim, 13thadaption and to the folks of **500 for 500** over at DLP for their input and assistance. Cheers all, your help was invaluable.

Chapter Eighteen

Skeleton Hunt III

_**The Noir hero is a knight in blood-caked armour. He's dirty, and he does his best to deny that he's a hero the whole time. **_

_**-Frank Miller**_

_There was a crooked boy who wore a crooked smile, and on his road to power, he walked a crooked mile. _

_Murderers don't come from happy homes. _

_Harry knows he's treading the line and yeah, the scariest thing about this whole mess? The only differences between himself and Tom Riddle are the times and dates of their respective fuck-ups. _

_They've killed a hell of a lot of people between the two of them._

_The soundtrack for this particular nightmare is a funeral dirge. A futile Hail Mary in an hour of desperation and need. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death._

_Downtown London is burning. _

_It burns so hot that the tarmac has turned back into a liquid state, cars sunk into the road up over their axles, all now the uniform grey of burned metal – the paint crisped right off. This is the height of the blaze when London burned the hottest. A red haze hangs over the city. Harry feels like he's taken a cursed portkey to the planet Mars 'cause he's choking on red, alien dust on a red alien earth, everything gone strange and _wrong_._

_Slender needles of rebar jut up out of the ground where there were once flats and offices and businesses. Some of the tallest buildings have burned so hot that the glass has bubbled and run down the sides like candlewax. The heart of the fire is a bright blinding _white_. Steam rises up from the Thames, the silver glint of fishbelly turned skyward as life dies off within it._

_The sky itself looks like it's on fire, but it'd be a bloody sunrise anyway, a red morning warning._

_The concrete beneath Harry's boots is hot enough to melt a layer of rubber from the soles and he's uncomfortably warm even through the heavy layers of protective charms on his armour and skin. In the cleared intersection of a four lane highway is a wooden desk and chair, office equipment complete with a potted plant and a full inbox. _

"_Our thirst for mayhem is not animalistic in its nature," intones the fat man behind the desk in the compelling resonance of an orator's voice, someone who could have been a radio announcer or film narrator in another life. "It is purely human. Animals don't have the leisure to enjoy killing; they kill for food. They kill for territory. They kill for self-defence."_

_He smiles at Harry and something dark and thick and black as tar drips from his mouth over the scruffy stubble on his chin. "We kill for pleasure. For us, murder is sport."_

_Backlit by the red glow of the inferno, the man is a round blob of void haloed in hellfire, his eyes leached of the intense blue, now the colour of old gold – pennies for the ferryman, have you paid your dues, sir? – but Harry recognizes him all the same._

_His picture sits in the training room at the Department of Mysteries where all new recruits must pass through. _

_Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate._

_The man's name is George Pryce. _

_The Butcher._

_The Devil himself._

"_Not even six months dead and they're already badmouthing my good name," says the jackal-eyed man, more of that lumpy black fluid running down his throat. _

_It stinks. It stinks like death warmed over and Harry flinches. He knows exactly what it is. It's not tar or blood or motor oil._

_Its raw sewage._

_Harry gags, the scent caught on the back of his tongue and he's sure he'll puke all over himself. He bends at the waist, spitting bile, hand covering his nose as if it could actually protect him from the foul odour. _

_Pryce laughs. _

"_The fuck is wrong with you?" Harry gasps out._

"_Wrong with me?" Pryce sneers and leans back in his chair, the front of his formal robes dark and wet all down the front. "I thought I'd beaten the stupid out of you, soldier."_

_Harry knows he's never met The Butcher before, living or deceased. "You're dead."_

_Pryce bares yellow teeth at him and they're as crooked as a picket fence in a backwater trailer park. "And you've answered your own question. Looks like you're not a fucking moron after all."_

_A skyscraper a few blocks back from the intersection begins to shake, concrete and steel shivering in the intense heat. It folds in on itself like a house of cards, red dust rising as it falls. And except for the rustle of Pryce's robes and the sound of his breathing and the Hail Marys murmured in his ear, it's dead silent; a pocket of calm crouched still and quiet in the middle of Hell._

"_What do you want?" Harry means for it to come out short and commanding, but mostly he just sounds tired. _

"_Just to talk." Light shines off the man's pale grey hair as he turns to look around him. "I wanted to remind you of a few things."_

_Harry grits his teeth. He hates politicians. It's always the same power play games – it's only the players that change. _

"_Why?" he snaps, not bothering to hide the aggression in his voice. _

_The man smiles close-lipped and tight, a useless twitch of muscle designed to placate without being sincere. "You've lived too long in a reality without rules."_

_Things would be a lot easier for Harry if he didn't have the dead marching through his head each time he closed his eyes. _

_"So what, now that I'm defective, that I'm…" Harry searches for the right words. "Damaged goods, you think it's okay to fuck around in my brain?"_

_The Butcher laughs, quick and hard, the sound a short bark of mirth._

"Harry, you are so far from 'damaged goods' it's almost absurd. For all your flaws and blundering screw-ups, you are a thing of razor-sharp intellect and dreadful fucking magnificence. If you are the greatest thing my program ever creates, then I can rest in peace a very satisfied man."

_Pryce leans back in his chair arms spread wide against the backdrop of fire. "And just look at what you've done! Look at all you've accomplished! Yet you think this is a shameful thing, that this is the fault of your heritage or your shitty Muggle upbringing or the death of your beloved godfather, who as it turns out, you didn't know very well anyway. Was he a person or a talisman to you?"_

_Something inside Harry starts howling. It is not a voice; it's not even sapient, thrashing about in his veins – red tide rising, red on the inside, red on the outside – _

'_Breathe, Potter, breathe. Don't let this fucker get to you.'_

"_I was grieving. You have no right to judge me, you son-of-bitch. At least I had a good reason to kill. I wanted vengeance. But you?" He can't help but curl his lip in revulsion. "You're just a cannibal. You're worse than a fucking vulture."_

"_And you think we went and took advantage of you in your vulnerable state of being. You were feeling so _vulnerable_ – " Pryce says the word the way you'd coo nonsensical endearments to a small and stupid animal. "That when we picked you up, drunk and belligerent, you still had blood caked under your fingernails where you blew Mac Billings head off with his own wand, his wife still asleep in the bed beside him – that was one hell of a mess to wake up to, don't you think?"_

_Harry crosses his arms, shoulders pinned back military straight. "He was a known Death Eater. You would have gotten him if I hadn't."_

"_Still pretty impressive for a seventeen year old kid. I wouldn't have believed you capable of that kind of brutality if we hadn't been cleaning up your messes for a year and a half before we arrested you. Obviously, the civilian life was not for you – not with Dumbledore's militia nor as the Ministry's Poster Boy._

"_You came to us raw, bloody, and untested. But the potential you held – "Pryce closes his eyes and exhales. "It was like trying to cup a thunderstorm in the palm of your hand."_

_Harry shakes his head, the air in his lungs desert-dry and dusty. "What are you getting at?"_

_Pryce folds his hands atop the desk, viscous black sewage drying on his chin, his eyes like polished basalt. "You are the way you are because of the choices you made. Can't blame that on anyone else but yourself. The only thing I want to know is why you insist on believing that they were the _wrong_ choices." _

_Pryce reaches into a drawer and drops Mac Billings' head onto the desk, its eyes rolled white in the skull, lips fallen away from the teeth and dried into a leer. _

"_The Wizarding World has to fear something. Why not yourself?"_

Harry blinked up at the thick red folds of his bed hangings for the second time that night, sweat-soaked sheets tangled around his legs. "We've got to stop meeting this way," he muttered over the sound of his dorm mates' snores.

* * *

Tonks and her partner had just finished rounding up a half-naked young wizard tripping on the latest drug out of Knockturn Alley when the murder floo-call came in.

It was her first.

"Gonna get our cherry popped," said Kent, bouncing on his heels as they walked up to the old Wilson House. It didn't look much different from the rest of the dreary townhouses lining this part of Knockturn Alley – tall and as narrow as a coffin was long with a black door and iron railings, it looked like it belonged in a fairy tale, one of the nastier ones where Hansel and Gretel weren't so lucky.

Ignoring her fellow trainee's nervous babble, Tonks climbed the steps to the townhouse, the damp wood unhappy and creaking under her weight. The heavy oak door had been blasted so forcefully off its hinges that the brass pivots were _torn_. Stepping aside to let the coroner's assistants past, Tonks took a deep breath before walking into the stale recesses of the entry hall.

At first she thought the carpet underfoot was made of heavy grey fibres. Then one of her heeled boots slid over the surface of the floorboards below and Tonks realized no, the dust was just that thick.

Kent made a strangled noise behind her, one foot held up in the air, arms raised in an odd, flapping crane position.

Bloody rich boys playing at being men. Daddy's money could buy him a job, but it couldn't buy him a proper pair.

"If you can't handle a little dirt, then you can kindly sod the hell off while the rest of us check out the double homicide," Tonks snapped, hair standing on end in a bright, red-orange mohawk.

"Tonks," echoed Kingsley Shacklebolt's basso over the busy murmur of the Aurors milling about the room.

"Sir?" she replied, perking up. Of all the people she'd been partnered with over the last few months, Shacklebolt was her favourite. No shit, no nonsense, no end of craziness could faze him, calm as a Buddhist monk in the midst of chaos. He also didn't mind her thousand and one questions and that _slight_ habit of tripping over her own feet.

Like right now.

Tonks caught herself on the doorframe before she could face plant into a pile of debris.

Blood was streaked all the way out into the hallway and it looked like a rather large body had collapsed in the dust before the coroners had moved it. Grateful she'd remembered to take the anti-nausea potion, Tonks joined Shacklebolt's larger than life form in what looked like the epicentre of a small hurricane.

What was left standing looked like something out of an evil medical laboratory. Tonks caught sight of a shiny pair of pliers that were probably intended to crack open rib bones and shuddered.

"What do you see?" asked Kingsley as he gazed around the room, still cloaked in his impenetrable Zen. "What story does this room tell?"

Tonks reached into her pocket and pulled out a pair of Graphorn gloves, her hair shifting to a dusty lavender bob. "Where is the other body?"

Shacklebolt pointed to the largest pile of debris.

Weaving around a pair of Aurors wielding a camera over an ugly spellburn on the floor, Tonks peeked around the wreckage.

This was her third and last year of Auror training. She was used to being escorted into a crime scene after the real law enforcement officers were done with it and asked for her assessment of the events. Nine times out of ten, Tonks was spot on.

But homicide cases were new.

It didn't look like a body at first.

Her initial impression was that it was a life-sized version of one of those creepy porcelain dolls dressed as a Day of the Dead reveller lying crumpled on a pile of half-singed books. Flexible joints and a face painted in a red rictus of terror with a great dark slash in the belly, something kinda greyish poking out…

Tonks swallowed back bile, determined not to puke at her first homicide scene.

In front of her was a large dark patch where the paint on the wall hadn't been bleached by sunlight. Judging from the books and broken bits of wood shelving, there had probably been a bookcase there at one point. There was an odd musty dampness to the patch of dust-carpet a few feet away and Tonks had a hunch that if she touched it, she'd still be able to feel the chilly sting of a frostbite hex.

"Tonks?"

She bit her lip, taking a second glance over the body and noting the plain, almost military style of clothes on the body. Raising her wand, Tonks cast a quick diagnostic spell on the area over the body's stomach. Nothing. It was completely clean of any spell residue.

"Whoever killed the victim," she replied, answering Shacklebolt's unasked question. "Is a skilled and experienced fighter."

The Auror's dark eyes held hers with steady regard. "Fighter? Not 'duellist'?"

"The destruction around here is…" Tonks glanced around the room again. "Well, doesn't it seem like a bit much? And look at the spellburns," she said, waving a hand around the room. "You have a handful of killing curses, a bone-breaker, a concussion hex, a curse originally intended for demolition and then what? A frostbite hex? An evisceration hex or two?"

"He?" Kingsley intoned, a dark brow climbing his forehead.

Tonks shrugged. "It just seems like a 'he'. A woman wouldn't be this excessively violent. I know even if I had a bone to pick with someone, I'd just get straight to the point and kill them. But this bloke? It's like he herded his prey into a situation where he could kill him with his hands instead of his wand."

"Prey. Interesting word choice."

"Look at the body. Look at the size of…" Tonks faltered, not wanting to call the body anything other than the body. If she did, then it would break the spell and there really would be a dead man at her feet and a potential killer on the loose – all live and very, very personal.

Shacklebolt nodded, knowing what she was trying to say and not judging her. "The victim is in excellent condition and should have been able to deal with an unskilled physical confrontation. But instead, his hand has three crushed fingers and a broken wrist and he's been sliced open from hipbone to hipbone. The lack of spell residue says it has to have been done physically."

"The killer is a skilled fighter," Tonks repeated, pushing past the nausea. "He uses his environment, his own physical strength, and magic all in conjunction. Duellists are typically snobs who fight with wands alone. Anything else is offensive to them."

Shacklebolt nodded and began to walk out of the room, Tonks following in his wake.

"The killer very obviously does not have this problem," he said. "The next logical conclusion would be that he is familiar with Muggle culture – may be even a halfblood."

"Or Muggleborn," Tonks finished gloomily, hair turning into limp shoulder-length locks the colour of dishwater. She peeled off her gloves and stuffed them back into her pocket. Tonks was glad she hadn't had to use them. "Thank god the press is too busy chasing after Black. One Auror dead and _another_ murderer on the loose? They'd throw about confetti and hold a parade."

Shacklebolt hummed in assent and smiled at her.

Tonks started, taken back.

"Well done, Miss Tonks," he said, holding out his hand for her to shake. "You've given me much to think on."

She reached out and shook his hand, feeling somewhat bewildered, yet proud that she'd actually anything to contribute to the investigation. "Thank you sir."

"Sorry, but I was told to talk to Auror Shacklebolt?"

Tonks turned.

The murmur belonged to a tall, pale-skinned woman with long jet-black hair that held a funny green shine where the light hit it. On second glance, Tonks could see that her irises were too large and too dark to be human, expanding out into the white of the sclera. The woman had her hands hidden in the voluminous sleeves of her russet-hued robes, but Tonks bet that she'd have the webbed fingers of a selkie.

"That would be me." Kingsley smiled, a flash of white teeth in a dark, handsome face and Tonks could see the young selkie begin to melt, a smile beginning to form in the place of a worried frown.

Tonks hid a smirk. That old charmer.

"I was walking home," the selkie began, comfortable enough now to gesture with her glove-covered hands as she talked. "And I heard noises from the old Wilson House. I saw a man, tall and shadowed by the lee side of the building, jump out of the window and run. It was only a half-glimpse, but it was enough. I recognized him. He was a patron at the Painted Rose."

"The Painted Rose? That's a ways away from here," Shacklebolt mused, his rich basso rumbling over the words.

"I work there on the weeknights. My flat is two streets over from here and normally I apparate the distance. But I'd had a stressful night so I decided to walk home instead."

Half-selkie, Tonks amended. Dark creatures didn't use wizarding magic, whether by choice or lack of ability, which meant the woman in front of her had probably passed her O.W.L.S with enough credits to qualify for apparation lessons. This wasn't someone who relied on her looks to get by in life - she was more than willing to work her arse off to provide for herself. Tonks reassessed the half-selkie as an intelligent and reliable witness, wanting to kick herself for falling into the trap of preconceived notions.

Shacklebolt dipped his head in response to the young woman's words. "Can you describe him for us?"

"Tall, lean, dark haired. Striking, with light coloured eyes – you can't really tell what colour is what under the lighting in the pub unless you can get a close look at things. He also had a scar that ran from here," she said, pointing her finger to her cheekbone and dragging it across into her hair. "To here. And when his sleeve fell back, I could see some unusually thick scarring around his wrist, too. Not the kind of man you bring home to mum, but certainly the one you'd lie to your husband about."

"About how old would you say he was?"

"Maybe twenty-ish? Early twenties? I couldn't tell. He appeared to be young, but…" The half-selkie's voice trailed off as she pushed a stray black curl out of her face, eyes flicking back and forth over something in mid-air only she could see.

"He lacked the swagger young men tend to put on when they wander into Knockturn looking to prove themselves," she finally continued. "He had an easy-going manner about him, but he was courteous and carried himself with the composure of somebody much older."

"That's a lot of detail to remember about one customer out of a hundred," said Shacklebolt without reproach.

The half-selkie shrugged pale, lovely shoulders bared by the draping cut of her robes. "He was a memorable individual."

"Anything else you can tell us about him?"

She shook her head, then paused like she was mulling over whether to divulge more information or not. "Someone met up with him at one of the back tables. This other man was skittish, you might have called him edgier than a drawer full of knives the way he couldn't stop looking over his shoulder. They seemed like family given how similar they looked and they way they interacted with each other, brothers or maybe cousins considering their ages.

"They quarrelled a bit and I couldn't hear what they said, not over the usual din in the pub, but they did part ways on amicable terms."

* * *

_Shit, shit, shit, fucking rookie error,_ Harry berated himself as he took off from his hiding spot on the balcony of a neighbouring townhouse and disappeared into the crush of wizard folk in Knockturn Alley's morning rush. He'd wandered back to the rundown townhouse, wanting to see what was happening with the investigation and in the process, he'd learned something new about himself.

Pryce was right.

He was too used to living in a world without rules. Too used to making messes and not having to clean them up: dead bodies lay where they had fallen and were either burned or buried under the rubble. Only that wasn't the way things went anymore. Now he had to be subtle, had to be clever. He wouldn't be able to get away with murder anymore.

Hell, even _Strome_ was right.

That was sloppy and careless and stupid and several other negative adjectives he could think of right then and there.

No wonder the vampire was angry with him. All that time spent honing Harry into an assassin's wet dream and _this_ was what he did with his life?

Harry hadn't missed the swift colour change of the young woman's hair, nor had he missed Shacklebolt's tall bulk among the milling Aurors and coronary staff.

Stupid, stupid, _stupid_.

Finding a small, out-of-the-way alley with no overlooking windows, Harry pulled the pewter figurine from his pocket. It shook itself off, then the dog's eyes blinked, mouth lolling open in a yawn. Its tiny teeth came down on his thumb, pinpricks of blood welling up where it had bitten. Then, with a short tugging sensation in his belly –

– Harry found himself flat on his ass again in the designated Portkey drop near Shorner's office.

"Goddamnit," Harry muttered to himself, struggling to his feet.

"First-timer?" asked the grizzled old security guard manning the drop point.

"No." Harry scrubbed his face with both of his hands, willing the dizziness to go away. "Just really unlucky."

Wobbling from the room, Harry stumbled down the industrial grey hallway to the offices. The main floor bullpen was a busy wash of people in an odd mixture of crisp suits and formal robes. One of the aides scurried around him, the tall sheaf of papers in her arms almost crawling with security spells. She gave him the once over, eyes narrowed and suspicious, which combined with her too-tight bun made her face look pointy and bird-like.

Harry began to feel a little self-conscious in his worn jeans, casual appearance way out of place. He fished the shot-bead chain of his dog tags from under his t-shirt and left it on top of his jumper. The suspicion tapered off and Harry darted through the desks as fast as he could without drawing more attention to himself.

Shorner's office didn't look much different from the last time he'd visited. Wall-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed full of folios and heavy tomes, his desk half-eaten by the mound of paperwork piled around it.

"What can you tell me about Morticus Calloway?" Harry asked as he closed the door behind him, apparently startling the shit out of Shorner who flinched hard enough to ram his knee into his desk. The man bit out an expletive through gritted teeth, glaring at Harry with watering eyes.

"Do you have a grudge against knocking on doors?" said Shorner irritably, pushing his chair back from his desk as he clamped a hand over his bruised appendage. He looked back up at Harry. "Calloway? Why do you ask?"

Like pulling a tooth, it was best get it over with all at once.

"Because before I killed him yesterday evening he attacked me and an Auror all kamikaze style. Didn't even bother to be stealthy, just started throwing around Killing Curses like you wouldn't believe."

Shorner blinked. "What? Wait, _what_?"

Harry nodded, bracing his hands on the back of Shorner's sturdy wooden guest chair in front of his desk. "Yeah, I didn't think it was a coincidence either. Someone's cleaning house in the DoM, and I'm not sure if they meant to get rid of me or him."

His handler held up a hand as if to ward off Harry's flow of words. "You killed who?"

"Morticus Calloway," Harry repeated in short, clipped tones.

"Good God, Harry." The other man paused, blinking at mid-air. "When did this happen?"

"Yesterday evening."

_That_ caught his attention.

Something like anger sparked in Shorner's eyes. "And you didn't think to tell me then?" he ground out.

Harry didn't even try to defend himself. "I know," he agreed.

"Why didn't you? I could have had this cleaned up within the hour and nobody would have been the wiser."

"Not possible. An Auror was killed in the process."

"You – you murdered an _Auror_?" Shorner gaped at him, horror etched into the slack lines of his features.

His grip on the back of the chair tightened and Harry could hear the wood creaking under his hands. "_I murdered no-one!_" Harry snarled, voice riding down the register until the words emerged at an almost sub-vocal rumble of fury, like thunder rolling over the horizon.

"Harry – "

"Archie, he was some unfortunate bastard that got caught in the crossfire. Mort ripped his throat out before I could tell the stupid son-of-a-bitch to get out of there. I didn't have the time to flash a badge number and qualifications at him – Mort had been stalking me for fifteen minutes beforehand with the intent to kill and I just couldn't do anything about the situation.

Cutting Shorner off before he could open his mouth, Harry spat out, "It happened too fast. Things are a lot different out in the field. There is no room for error, no time to think on the morality of your actions, but you've got to keep planning and calculating on your feet because a single mistake could be your last."

Shorner raised both hands in the air in a gesture of submission. "I understand. I only wish you had told me earlier than today. I will have to make a full enquiry into your actions and the actions of your fellow agent and this incident may end up as a black mark in your record."

Harry let out an unhappy bark of laughter and crossed his arms as he watched Archie pull out a fresh sheet of parchment from under the piles of paperwork. "Wouldn't be the first."

Shorner stopped searching for a quill and looked up, eyes sharp with anger. "This time around? Yes, it is."

Harry swallowed, taken back and not sure what to think.

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?" Shorner repeated, gentle despite his apparent anger.

"I guess I'm too used to living in a world without rules."

The other man shook his head in frustration, glancing away from Harry to scan over his bookshelves before meeting his eyes again. "Talk to me," said Shorner. "I can't do anything about the past, but I can run damage control from here. Tell me everything that happened." He pointed a finger at Harry, expression fixed and intent. "And I mean _everything_."

* * *

The Main Hall of Hogwarts was lit with a bright splash of sunlight, house banners vibrant and proud in the late-morning glow.

Harry's stomach growled as he climbed up the entry hall stairs, reminding him that he hadn't had breakfast yet despite being up for close to five hours already. The timeturner hummed against his skin where it was tucked under his shirt. Hands in his pockets, head tilted down and lost in thought, Harry almost walked past Dumbledore without noticing.

"A lovely morning for a stroll, isn't it?"

Harry flinched, muscles straining against the demands of long ingrained reflexes to attack.

"Professor!" he managed to gasp out, failing miserably in his attempts to save face. "I didn't see you!" He rubbed damp palms on his denims, nerves still jangling. "I'm sorry, I know it's close to when classes start."

The Headmaster smiled, warm and knowing, a certain fondness etched into the lines of his face. Tiny silver stars swirled in loose, dizzy loops on the Headmaster's dusky purple robes and Harry found his gaze caught before he could shake the hypnotic distraction from his mind.

"I wonder, Harry," said Albus Dumbledore. "If you might take a short walk with me."

Harry swallowed, his throat sandpaper dry. "Sure, I don't mind."

"I find myself curious as to where your adventures took you this morning." The Headmaster's tone was light and mild-mannered and had Harry been anyone else, he too would have believed it to be nothing more than an idle statement of curiosity.

It wasn't a question. It was a subtle, but firm request and Harry knew well the hazardous pitfalls of the Headmaster's clever wordplay.

"I… went for a walk around the lake."

Dumbledore's brows rose. "Some of that edges into the Forbidden Forest, Harry," came the gentle rebuke.

"I know. I needed to stretch my legs for a bit, though. I was starting to feel cooped up here."

"It was never in my intentions to make you feel like a prisoner."

Harry couldn't help the wisp of nostalgia that stole through him. He'd heard that statement many times before Dumbledore's death. And for all of Albus Dumbledore's past mistakes, Harry had found his only real crime was that the man was far too forgiving of the damned and the hopeless. He smiled at his old mentor.

"I know it's not," he replied. "And I get it. There are a lot people who are all too willing to take a shot at me given half a chance."

"That's very wise of you."

Harry shrugged, long legs falling into cadence with his old mentor's stride. "Necessity is a harsh teacher."

"She is indeed. Would you care to join me for brunch? This old man could use some company." Dumbledore laid a finger to the side of his long, crooked nose, a spark of conspiring humour in his eyes. "_And_ some peace of mind, if you please."

Harry couldn't help, but grin at the Headmaster's antics. As much as he disagreed with the man's politics, he'd missed the old man's good-natured humour when he was gone, one of the last sparks of light and verve and hope snuffed out of Harry's life. The countdown to the end had begun there, that tick, tick, ticking of a phantom chronometer winding its way down.

Giving up had been a whole lot easier after that.

"– Harry?"

A shiver danced over his skin. "Sir? I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."

Bright eyes peered past bushy white brows, concern drawn in the lines of Dumbledore's visage. "Are you quite alright, Harry?"

"Of course, Professor. My mind just drifted a bit. I'd love to join you for brunch."

Albus Dumbledore was anything, but stupid. "Excellent!" he replied, taking the hint that Harry didn't want to discus the topic any further. "Would a short detour through the kitchens be amiss? I'm feeling rather peckish myself and I'm afraid all that's left in the Great Hall are scraps."

Harry managed to smile through the low-welling tide of grief lapping at the shoreline of his emotions. "Thank you, Professor," he said, voice taking on a hoarse note despite himself. "I'd like that."

'_Get a hold of yourself, Potter.'_ As if the Headmaster wasn't cataloguing his every reaction to chew over in the late hours of the evening.

Dipping his head in acknowledgment, Dumbledore folded his hands behind his back as the two meandered their way towards the kitchens. "I've heard all good things from your teachers so far, though I believe Professor McGonagall would like for you to study up on the practical side of transfiguration."

Stifling a wince, Harry nodded in reply. His first transfiguration lesson of the year had been mostly a put on show of futility. The material itself was easy – stuff he could do in his sleep. But the Holly wand had been reluctant to respond, turning uncomfortably hot in his palm, not quite spitting sparks, but close.

Harry didn't remember Ollivander's full spiel on his wand, but he was certain 'temperamental' and 'sullen' weren't part of the wandmaker's descriptors.

Dumbledore cast him a glance from over the rims of his glasses.

"Yeah," Harry said, realizing his old mentor expected an answer of him. "I've always struggled a little with transfiguration. I mean, I get the theory just fine – it actually makes a lot of sense once you get through all of the weird jargon – but I don't think I'm quite as suited for the subject as my dad was."

He wasn't lying. For all of his other talents, transfiguration remained one of his worst skills. Most of the upper-level transfigurations were an exercise in pulling teeth.

The Headmaster hummed in agreement. "You'll often find that certain traits will sometimes skip a generation in the older Families."

Unease rippled down his spine. Harry didn't know why his subconscious had capitalized 'Families', but it destroyed any sense of ease Harry felt in the Headmaster's presence. This conversation was merely an interrogation cloaked in a sheep's skin as to hide the canny old wolf's sharp teeth beneath.

Dumbledore smiled. "Perhaps the talent will pop up again in your children?" he queried.

If he were anybody else, Harry would have ripped his head off and shit down his throat. He would never bring children into this world. Not this Hell. Not when the only thing he'd leave for them was a legacy so bloody, it was almost worse than what he had fought against.

Perhaps sensing the darker turn of Harry's thoughts, the Headmaster skilfully changed the subject. "Your mother on the other hand showed a remarkable gift for charms work. A gift, I hear she has passed on to you. Have you given any thought to studying the Art of Animation?"

"I have," said Harry. "But I'd have to learn Kinetomancy first and I don't know how Professor Flitwick would feel about me jumping ahead of his curriculum."

"I'm quite sure he wouldn't mind at all," Dumbledore replied as they turned the corner, a pair of fourth years darting past them towards McGonagall's classrooms at the front of the school.

"In fact," his old mentor continued, seeing that Harry's attention was still fixed on him. "I believe if you presented your wish to study Animation, Fillius would be very accommodating."

Harry didn't know how else to play an 'average' student except to explain away some of his skills as inborn talent. It didn't make things any easier though, and Harry was beginning to wonder how he was going to extract himself from Hogwarts without undue attention being thrown his way.

"Are you sure?" he asked Dumbledore, frowning as if he doubted the veracity of the Headmaster's assurances. "I'm no Hermione."

Dumbledore smiled. "Quite sure. You're a good deal younger than his usual students of Animation and Kinetomancy, but I believe that you are capable of rising to the occasion if you apply yourself."

The staircase groaned under them and began to pull away from the wall.

Harry swayed with the momentum of the staircase's abrupt movement. "I'd have talked to him after class yesterday if I hadn't thought it was too early in the year to ask about more advanced material."

"I understand." The stairs rumbled to a halt at the hallway leading to the kitchens and the Headmaster stepped off as if he hadn't even noticed the move. "I must confess Harry, I did have an ulterior motive in speaking with you this morning."

Albus Dumbledore was the kind of man who didn't like asking questions that he didn't already know the answers to.

"Motive?" Harry parroted, deciding to play dumb. He wasn't sure what the Headmaster had tucked up his sleeve. He had been as circumspect as possible when leaving the castle, hadn't performed any magic outside of classes, no late night wandering around either.

Whatever it was had to be serious, because he hadn't seen that expression on his old mentor's face since he was seventeen years old and he'd just been arrested under suspicion of murder. The man had walked directly into the interrogation room where Harry was held and asked him in a voice wracked with disbelief: _"Did you do this?"_

Harry never wanted to see that look directed at him again. It was shock and grief and stunned disbelief. It was the expression a parent wore when they turned on the telly and realized that the boy on the screen, the one standing on the bridge with one foot lifted in the air, telecasters glibly throwing around sound bytes like _jump_ and _fly_ and _suicide_, the loose cotton of the boy's t-shirt caught in the wind like white bird's wings, dark blue water waiting below and the only thing holding him up was sky – that stunned realization that boy was their own son, _that_ was what Dumbledore's expression was like.

And perhaps Dumbledore had seen him jump. Hell, he'd jumped right in front of him. Swan-dived right off into the deep end. Harry wasn't proud of it, but he was one of the few people capable of wringing such intense anguish from Albus Dumbledore.

There was only a hint of that look on the Headmaster's face, but Harry knew what lurked beneath that calm façade.

Swallowing back his guilt, Harry asked, "I'm afraid I don't understand, sir."

"Harry, I'm a bit troubled by some of the occurrences on the train."

Harry stopped in front of the still life of a bowl of fruit. The rest of the hallway to the kitchens lacked any other portraits or spying ears. "The dementors."

His mentor turned to face him, the golden frames of his glasses winking in the light. "Yes, I find myself concerned by your reaction to the dementors. And by the fact you haven't sought any answers for the incident as well."

"I haven't reacted to them since," Harry replied, meeting Dumbledore's eyes without fear. Not surprisingly, the man didn't even make the slightest effort to test his Occulomency shields. His mentor was not a hypocrite – he did not make demands of other people that he did not expect of himself and to Albus Dumbledore, the mind was a man's sanctuary and should be treated with respect.

There were times when Harry felt ashamed of himself, that he could and _would_ voluntarily violate someone else's mind without care or guilt. But never for the action itself.

The Headmaster spread his hands in acquiescence. "It does not erase what happened to you, Harry, but I have done my best to ensure that no other student will ever experience what you did. The dementors are banished from the school grounds and only patrol the borders of Hogwarts."

"You're right, it doesn't erase what happened. But it _does_ help. I'm not so wrapped up in myself that I can't see what you're doing or how much you care for your students."

At Dumbledore's raised brow, Harry amended. "Hey, I've been working on this 'growing up' thing."

"I see." Disbelief was a subtle note in the Headmaster's expression, but Harry knew what to look for. Dumbledore was far too astute to accept his lies at face value. The best Harry could hope to achieve was misdirection, which would only buy him time for so long.

Harry tickled the pear in the painting. The door swung open, revealing the cheerful chaos of the kitchens, house-elves swerving every which way, carrying heavy platters of half-prepared ingredients, armfuls of cleaning supplies and other whatnot.

A tiny, squeaky-voiced elf wearing what appeared to be a pastel-yellow shower curtain scurried up to the pair and curtseyed. "What can Missy do for sirs?"

Dumbledore smiled down at the house-elf, some of the heavy tension leaving his countenance. "Breakfast, if you please, Missy."

They were situated at the small corner table; only enough room for a pair of forks and the plates piled high with food, before Dumbledore broke the silence.

"Harry, have you ever encountered dementors before?"

Harry stopped chewing and swallowed with difficulty, the lump in his throat more than just metaphorical.

"Yes," he finally said.

There really was no other way around it.

"Dementors aren't easy to deal with on the best of days," Dumbledore replied. "How on earth did you run into them?"

Harry was startled by the sudden deep, harsh laughter bubbling up out of his throat. "Bad luck and chance."

Before he died, there had to have been at least a hundred dementors for every person still alive. Nausea stirred in his belly, the sense-memory scent of burning things and the cold, sickly-sweet smell of the rotting dead so strong he could almost taste it.

Dumbledore sat straighter in his chair, alarm beginning to show in his posture. "You seem to have had quite an eventful summer."

"I wish I could tell you more," Harry stated quietly.

'_I really do,'_ he thought. _'But I don't trust you.'_

He hadn't said it out loud, but Harry didn't have to – Dumbledore was an old hand at picking up the understated and unsaid. His expression tightened and he spoke in a creaky old man's wheezing breath, "Who was it that took you from Privet Drive?"

'_Me, myself, and I.' _

Harry swallowed back a loon's giggle. "I can't tell you yet, but if it makes you feel any better, it's someone you know. And I think it's someone you used to trust."

He shook his head when he saw his mentor beginning to form his next question. "I'm to remain reticent on these matters. There are several competing interests in the Ministry who are far too interested in taking advantage of whatever they can sink their claws into."

The timer charm on Harry's watch went off, letting him know he had less than five minute to make it to class.

Dumbledore leaned forward, placing a hand on Harry's side of the table as if it would hold him in place. "Are you in any danger?"

"Only from myself," he replied. The joke fell flat and Harry regretted his flippant words as soon as they left his mouth.

Something akin to desperation and frantic worry entered Dumbledore's expression and this time, his mentor made no effort to hide his concern. "Harry. If you don't tell me what's wrong, I can't help you."

Harry was beginning to feel like one of those amputee victims who claimed that their feet were cramping when their legs had been blown off well above the ankle. The central nervous system was already wired before birth and the body was so used to having feet and ankles and shins and kneecaps that the neurons were still firing off signals as if there were. And here he was bemoaning that he couldn't talk to the one person who should have known him better than himself, but when it came down to it, Harry was the only one to blame.

After all, it'd been his fault the Death Eater assassin made it into the Great Hall. Harry hadn't been able to stop himself from sneaking through the secret passages to hunt down Death Eaters, leaving Dumbledore unable to raise the outer wards, the final bulwark against invasion that would seal off the castle.

"I'm the last person who deserves your concern."

Dumbledore's blue eyes went wide behind his glasses and Harry fled the kitchens before the Headmaster could respond.

This wasn't the first time Harry felt exhausted by the manic tap-dancing needed to stay ahead of what was to come, but his efforts were beginning to feel like a pitiful wall of sandbags braced for a storm that would swallow the sun.

* * *

Pale September sunlight warmed Remus' hands folded atop the desk.

There was something fundamentally wrong about sitting on this side of the classroom – like watching the sun come up on the wrong side of the sky.

Oh sure, it'd seemed a great idea in the Headmaster's office; the way Albus Dumbledore had framed the notion of teaching, made the sharing of his wealth of knowledge with the younger generations appear noble and erudite. But now with the prospect of an entire classroom filled with the little hellions staring him in the face…

The classroom Dumbledore assigned him had been used as a lecture hall when Remus attended Hogwarts. Now, it was a divided classroom and living quarters. Lined with windows stretching from floor to the castle's cathedral ceilings, it sill felt like a vast, cavernous area despite being crammed full of Dark Arts artefacts for his upper years' lectures and cages of dark creatures for his younger years.

Remembering that his next class was with Gryffindors _and_ Slytherins, Remus stood and began directing all breakable or dangerous objects from the classroom, cages growing legs and scurrying out of sight, Dark Arts paraphernalia flying off into his office.

Obviously, the Gryffindors would want to sit near the windows, all that light and open air a temptation for daydreams. The Slytherins would claim the desks nearest the wall and closest to the door so that whatever came through the windows would eat the foolhardy Gryffindors first while the Slytherins got away. Remus had never met a more paranoid bunch.

The old grandfather clock in his living quarters chimed the turning of the hour, audible all the way into the classroom and Remus felt his blood turn to ice.

Fifteen minutes from now, James' son would walk through those doors and Remus was woefully unprepared. This was Remus' first class and what was probably the first crowd the werewolf had been in since the events following October thirty-first, 1981. Shaking, Remus reached out and braced himself on the windowsill, his composure slipping through his fingers like smoke. He'd spent twelve years wandering the remote parts of the world, learning all that he could and this was what came of it?

Why, oh why had he let Albus talk him into teaching?

In truth, Remus Lupin wore calm the way a duck wore feathers.

It was a natural adaptation to his environment, sharing his mind and body with the savage brute that lived within his flesh. As if he could control the beast's instincts by drugging it into insensibility with wolfsbane and a bhikkhus' disciplined tranquillity. Remus knew the real reason why he locked himself up on a full moon, the real reason behind the monster's destructive tendencies: It was easier for an animal to vent his frustrations on the walls of his cage than a man to take responsibility for the damage he'd wrought on other people.

So if he'd come to expect the worst of a situation, then it was just another natural adaptation on a long list forced upon him on an ill-fated night when the moon was high.

He'd lived with it for this long – he'd cope. The world couldn't change to accommodate every supernatural curse, after all. Too many different beliefs and everyone knowing that they alone were right and righteous. But he hated, _hated_ it for what they'd done to his relationship with James Potter. They were friends for so long, and James was the first of the other Marauders to have gone the extraordinary length of becoming Animagi for him. _And even then__,_ James let prejudice reach him as the werewolves began siding with Voldemort en masse.

And it killed him.

A few weeks before October 31st of 1981, Remus went to see James after an Order meeting. He showed up in an unscheduled visit at the pub James frequented in the little village by Godric's Hollow. With all of the suspicion thickening the air over his loyalties, James wasn't too pleased. Remus' temper stirred from its slumber and both him and James exchanged words of a decidedly hostile nature. And eventually, they came to blows over their differences, inciting a bloody and violent pub brawl.

But sometime in the moments after the fight, Remus realized that James was going to die.

He'd known this, known it to the core of his being, the wolf howling the distress inside him that Remus couldn't bring himself to voice. James had escaped Voldemort by the skin of his teeth too many times already. The centre could not hold and this time, the odds did not fall in James' favour. Because despite Dumbledore's considerable protections, despite James' clever trickery and creative warding, despite Lily's power and skill, Voldemort was going to walk into James' home and destroy his family.

And he'd been too much of a coward to say anything because how could you tell someone that they were going to die, when they thought you a potential traitor and spy? When the only proof you could offer them was the sinking feeling in your stomach and the chill on your spine?

Remus let his best friend walk away with the imprints of his fists bruising James' face, the words of warning stuck in his throat.

Twelve years was a long time to mourn someone.

The classroom doors swung open and the students shuffled into the classroom in a large, noisy herd.

His first impression of James' son had been the aftermath of a dementor encounter gone horribly wrong. Harry' countenance was that of a terrified young man spattered in sticky black blood, green eyes wide and glassy, skin white as milk and drawn with horror. It lent the boy a ghoulish air, more ghastly phantom than flesh and blood boy.

It was the sort of introduction that stuck with a person.

In the polished glass of the windowpane, he watched Harry stand with his friends amongst the milling students in the doorway of the classroom and marvelled. In the flush of health, Harry's resemblance to his parents was so uncanny that Remus wondered if their ghosts were reaching out to him from the beyond. It was a curious thing to watch the shape of James' mouth stretch into Lily's smile; to watch Lily's eyes gleam with James' mischief; to see James' build with Lily's height, Lily's cheekbones on James' thin face. And if Harry was the perfect mesh of his parents in his physical traits, he was like neither in personality.

James was... playful as a boy and if that tendency bordered on cruelty, then it was a by-product of being a very privileged only-child. The Potters were rich, older, and doting. James reflected all of that. He could in turn also be very charming, loyal, and self-sacrificing. It was a duality of nature that served him well and it went hand in hand with being naturally gifted in almost everything he touched. He'd become a Master of Transfiguration in his sixth year and an Auror Apprentice in his seventh based on his duelling skills alone. He'd taken First in the national duelling contests and Third internationally, not to mention the numerous Quidditch teams that had bid highly for his skills as a Chaser.

It was a formidable résumé.

And Lily... Lily was beautiful.

Lily was beautiful in a way that made most people stupid with lust and envy. She could fill a crowded room to the corners with her presence and still make someone feel like they were the only person there worth her interest. Like James, she was a natural entertainer and was the centre of attention in every crowd.

Remus hadn't known her that well, but what he remembered…

She too, was an impossible figure to live up to.

Time had worn off all of their rough edges, turning Lily and James into saints and martyrs, more legend than real people.

Harry was not what he'd expected.

Not even close.

He thought he'd find a little Lily or a miniature James.

The quiet, lanky boy with the watchful eyes acted more like a kicked puppy than anything like his long dead parents. Thinking back on the shrivelled husks of the dementors, Remus reminded himself: Sometimes, kicked dogs turned mean.

Remus mustered a smile and turned to face the class. "Good Morning! Welcome to this year's Defence Against the Dark Arts. My name is Remus Lupin. Now I'm not a stickler for grand titles of respect – but I would like to be called something other than, 'Hey you!'"

A ripple of laughter went around the room.

Remus counted that as a victory and went on. "I just want to go over a few things before we begin. Does everyone have a copy of Taylor's _A Journey into the Dark Arts_?"

A slight blonde with a green and silver emblem on her robes shook her head.

"No?" Remus asked. "Do you have somebody you can share with until you can get a copy?"

The girl sitting next to her shoved her desk closer and flipped her book open so it rested on both desks. "Here, Daphne," she said, tucking a dark curl of her short, blunt bob behind her ear. "Share with me for now."

"Thank you. Pansy Parkinson, is it? Two points to Slytherin for taking the initiative," said Remus, ignoring the sound of muted grumbling issuing from the red and gold side of the classroom. "Does everyone also have a copy of _Carnivorum Formidulosus_?"

Remus glanced at several students whom Albus had brought to his attention, taking a special notice to the wide berth the Malfoy heir kept between him and Harry. Draco Malfoy's account of what happened on the train painted a gory picture of adrenaline-fuelled aggression rather than the befuddled fear of a typical dementor encounter.

Which was a curious reaction for a thirteen year old to possess. It spoke of a certain experience with fear, _extreme_ fear of the life or death sort – a reflex to attack instead of cower – that nobody, let alone a Third Year, should have. And let alone the fact that the way he'd killed them indicated an intimate knowledge of dementor physiology.

A skilled Occulomens might be able to function through the effects of a dementor in order to get close enough to kill one, but...

Who would want to get close enough to a dementor to find out how to kill it?

"You won't need your books today," said Remus. "But I will expect you to have them ready by the time we meet again next week." The few students who hadn't admitted to their lack of books looked relieved. "As I've understood it, you've never had a practical Defence lesson save for a rather _disastrous_ incident last year with a cage of pixies."

Some of the students' smiles looked a little too gleeful.

"I thought I'd give you a bit of experience dealing with what we'll be covering in this year's class. Every other lesson will be a practical one –"

A murmur of excitement ran through the classroom.

"And!" Remus called out over the noise. "I will _not_ be assigning a lot writing either!" He knew he'd be a shoe-in for teacher-of-the-year on his last statement alone. "Believe me, I despise grading essays almost as much as you hate writing them.

"However, I _will_ be grading you on your physical interaction with the various dark creatures I'll be bringing in for you to study," he said, watching the class sober immediately. "On the off days, we will be discussing passages from _A Journey into the Dark Arts_."

A hand shot up into the air.

"Yes, Hermione?"

The bushy-haired witch sitting beside Harry straightened the cuffs of her robes and spoke. "Isn't that book a little controversial for this class?"

Remus almost smiled. "Do you feel it's an inappropriate choice of study material?"

"Parts of the book are very, ah..." she began, voice wavering.

"Descriptive?" drawled Pansy Parkinson, turning in her seat to face Hermione. "_Racy_?"

Hermione's lips thinned and she drew herself upward, spine stiff and straight. "Yes," she said, not batting an eyelash.

The heavy-set witch sitting behind Pansy snorted gracelessly. "Un-wad your panties, Granger. Most of us are almost fourteen," said Millicent Bulstrode. "Not like we're little kids here."

"I actually think the book is a good choice," announced Pansy to the class at large. "I read it when it first came out over the summer and I think that the book is highly appropriate for this class. We're a Defence Against the Dark Arts class, yes? Then what better to study than a book on the dark arts written by a dark wizard?"

Blaise Zabini kicked his chair back on two legs and smirked. "Know thine enemy," he said from his position on the back row. The dark-skinned boy looked remarkably like his mother and Remus knew that come sixteen, seventeen years old, Blaise would make his way through the female population much like a young Sirius Black of yesteryear.

"What about the whole 'When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you' rot?" queried Finnegan.

"That's 'you become what you behold'," corrected Hermione. "And yes, you have a good point. Some of what's written in _A Journey into the Dark Arts_ could be considered encouraging towards experimenting with dark magic."

A blonde witch Remus identified as Lavender Brown rolled her eyes. "What harm could a book do?"

Remus watched Harry's eyes flick towards Draco Malfoy, who was already looking at him from across the classroom.

"A lot more than you think," muttered the red-haired boy on Harry's left.

"Five points to both Slytherin and Gryffindor. I'm glad to see everyone chiming in here," said Remus with a smile. "I must confess that I was worried _A Journey into the Dark Arts_ might be a bit above your level, but I can see that my fears were unfounded. Well done, everyone. Well done. I will let you know now that I'll be counting class participation towards your grade.

"But I will not detract from your grade should you choose not to join the conversation. I understand that some of these topics are a bit sensitive and not everybody wishes to share their views."

He recognized the solemn note on both Draco Malfoy's and Neville Longbottom's faces, which bespoke of an understanding that both held secrets they would not willingly share with their friends and classmates – Draco of his father's deeds in the war and Neville of his parents' torture.

"Can anyone tell me what a boggart is?" asked Remus, switching topics abruptly.

"A shape-shifter, sir," came Hermione's voice from the back of the class. "It forms itself into what it thinks will frighten us the most. They like small, dark places to hide in such as cupboards and closets – if it can fit itself in there, it will."

"They're a nuisance, is what they are," muttered Pansy with an irritable toss of her head.

"Both of you are quite right," Remus agreed, as he turned and wrote the boggart's characteristics across the chalkboard. "They're a problem many of the older homes in Britain suffer from. As you'll find in _Carnivorum Formidulosus_, boggarts are attracted to great sources of magic – especially an ambient magic built up over a long period of time. Now this is a somewhat confusing characteristic because like dementors –"

Remus was aware of the many eyes fixed upon him. But he stiffened, as a green stare bore into the back of his skull. He knew instinctively whom those eyes belonged to.

"– they feed off of intense human emotions; in the boggart's case, fear instead of despair, rather than magic itself like a vampire via blood or as a veela would off of desire."

"_Uh_-oh," said Seamus Finnegan to muffled snickers.

Remus turned to face the class. "This particular boggart moved into the staff wardrobe the day before yesterday. I asked Professor Dumbledore to leave it for my third years and he was kind enough to honour my request."

With a flourish, Remus removed the silencing spell and Disillusioned the wardrobe at tend of the classroom. The wardrobe rattled and shook as the boggart tried to jiggle the lock loose.

Several pairs of startled eyes whirled to the back of the classroom.

"Yes," said Remus, his demeanour calm and unruffled. "_That_ would be the boggart in question."

Some of the students gave him a look like he'd lost his sanity for bringing such a creature in without informing them prior to class.

"If you'll please pack up and move your belongings to the wall on the left," said Remus, serene expression firmly in place.

As the students picked up their bags and stood, the desks and chairs grew little wooden lion's feet and trotted out of the way. Seamus yelped, as his chair took off with him still seated.

Eventually, the children stood in a rough semi-circle in front of the wardrobe. Shuffling about nervously, they watched the wardrobe jump and shudder as the boggart beat itself against the insides.

"As of right now," Remus called out as he walked along in front of the class, careful to keep his eyes off the dancing wardrobe. "The boggart is still contained in darkness and has not assumed a form. It hasn't seen us yet so it will have no idea of what frightens us the most." Remus focused on Harry, who was warily flicking his gaze between him and the wardrobe. "We still have a big advantage over the boggart. Do you see it, Harry?"

The boy shook his head, shoulders hiked up around his ears, eyes suddenly glued to his ratty trainers.

"It won't know what shape to be," spoke up the red-haired boy standing next to Harry. Ron Weasley was easily the tallest boy in his class, beating out both Harry and Dean Thomas in the height categories. So when he stepped forward to stand next to Hermione Granger, the majority of Harry's bulk was neatly hidden behind Ron. "There's too many of us here for it know what will scare us."

Remus hadn't missed how relived Harry was to be out of the spotlight. Or how Ron had nudged him in the ribs after Harry refused to answer.

"Exactly! Two points to Gryffindor. The boggart will become confused and try to turn itself into several things at once. If a group of people shared between them the fear of mummies and sharks, the boggart may try to turn itself into a dead shark wrapped in bandages."

The little blonde girl, Daphne, wrinkled her nose with a grimace. Pansy patted her shoulder in sympathy.

"Or," Remus continued, keeping a straight face. "It may just turn into a toilet roll with gills."

The class burst into laughter.

Remus smiled. "Yes, laugh! It's your greatest tool against a boggart! The boggart cannot _stand_ laughter, cannot bear it. Laughter is anthema to a boggart. There is a very simple charm to repel them, but it requires a strong will and – " He grinned; the whole class was enthralled. "A certain sense of humour."

Harry finally smiled and though it was small, it was like the sun had come out from behind heavy clouds.

"I want you all to practice saying the charm before we begin," said Remus, elated that things were going so well. "Repeat after me: _Riddikulus!_"

"_Riddikulus!_"

Remus noted that a few had only mouthed the words instead of saying them out-loud. "Again!" he called out.

"_**Riddikulus!**_" the class cried out. The wolf's sensitive ears picked out Harry's low voice rumbling along under it all. Remus' eyebrows rose. Well, _that_ would explain why the boy was so reluctant to speak up in class. Just coming into his teens and already his voice was breaking – no wonder Harry was so shy.

"Nicely done! For the next part of this lesson, I'll need a volunteer. Anybody feeling brave enough?"

Severus' throw-away comment about animal tendencies in the staffroom should not have affected Remus' ire. He was used to far worse in everyday life. But somehow, just the same as when they were schoolboys, Severus Snape's vitriol wormed its way under his skin, scoring a direct hit on a place he'd no longer thought as vulnerable.

"Neville," said Remus, hating how effortless it was to start the cycle of malicious pranks once more. Neville's terror of Snape was too well-known to pass up. "Would you please join me in front of the wardrobe?"

The boy, just now beginning to grow out of the plumpness of childhood, shook his mother's thick brown hair from his eyes and started forward, nervous like he was headed to his own execution. Here was another child that should never be this timid. Frank and Alice would be appalled at the way Neville's confidence had been run into the ground.

Ignore a chance to boost Neville's self-esteem and get one over Severus at the same time?

Never.

"This is the difficult part, Neville," said Remus. Neville Longbottom's ears were turning red with embarrassment as he stared down at his feet, not even daring to meet Remus' eyes. "What do you believe scares you the most in the world?"

Neville let out a sheepish huff of laughter and nervously rubbed the side of his nose. "Er, Professor Snape, sir," he said in as tiny a voice as he could manage.

"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that, Neville," said Remus idly. "Would you repeat that, please?"

"Professor Snape, sir," said Neville, a bit louder than before.

The class snickered.

In contrast to the guffaws from the Gryffindor side of the room, the glares from Slytherin could have flayed Neville alive. Draco Malfoy opened his mouth, a sneer twisting his expression into something ugly and pinched. Then Draco looked sideways and cringed, ducking his head down and away, snide comment long forgotten.

Following Draco's gaze across the room, Remus found himself watching a very different Harry than before. The boy hadn't eased from where he held himself closed off and defensive, but the hard stare focused on the side of Draco's head made the wolf shift about inside, uneasy and not sure why.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you live with your grandmother, yes?" Remus asked the boy standing beside him.

"I do," said Neville, nodding his head. "But I don't find her very funny, sir."

"I imagine not," replied Remus. "I want you to picture your grandmother in your mind for me. Now what sort of clothes does she usually wear?" Remus held up a hand when Neville started to describe what she wore. "Don't tell me, just concentrate on her clothes. Concentrate very hard. Can you see them as clearly as if they were before you right now?"

"Er, I think so," Neville began, peering into thin air like he was seeing those nebulous clothes dancing about in front of his eyes. "Yes, I can."

"Prepare yourself, Neville. When the wardrobe bursts open, the boggart will assume the form of Professor Snape. And when that happens..." Remus bent closer to whisper in Neville's ear. "I want you to picture Professor Snape in your grandmother's clothes."

A startled laugh slipped out of the boy's throat. "Wait!" he said, face paling to a stark, ghostly white. "Won't he be angry?"

Remus felt a glimmer of doubt, but pushed onward. "I'm reasonably certain he will be far more furious with me than you." Facing the class, Remus said, "I want you to think on what frightens you the most and how you might make it into something more humorous. When Neville is through with the boggart, it will likely turn its attention onto you instead."

Some of the expressions on the students' faces were downright comical into as they thought upon the boggart. Harry's red-haired companion muttered feverishly about taking its legs out from under the creature as his face contorted into an expression that could best be described as 'constipated'.

Harry didn't seem the least bit bothered by facing the thing he feared the most. He stared out the windows at the cloudless, sunny day beyond, hands in his pockets, some of the heavy tension lifting from his shoulders.

"Ready?" Remus called out. "One – Two – Three!" Casting a quick unlocking spell at the wardrobe, Remus stepped back and let Neville at the emerging Severus Snape.

The man glided forward, black robes flaring out behind him like bat wings, a cheesy costume straight out of a cheap vampire film. Snape glared down his hooked nose, lips thin with irritation, his skin the sallow, greasy texture of someone who hadn't seen the sun in long, _long_ time. His hand was just rising out of his pocket, wand clasped in a white-knuckled grip.

Neville lifted his wand and stuttered out, "_Re... re... Riddikulus!_"

Severus staggered backwards on four-inch heels, his robes replaced with a stiff, Victorian dress trimmed in copious amounts of frothy black lace. His lank, shoulder-length hair was combed back into a severe bun, a pointed emerald witch's hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head with a ridiculous stuffed vulture staring imperiously from the brim, its long, moth-eaten tail-feathers hanging down the back.

The class howled with laughter. Boggart-Snape flinched and Remus ushered Parvati Patil forward.

**Crack!** Now the boggart was a severed hand, dashing across the floor on its fingertips.

"_Riddikulus!_" she cried, pointing her wand at the boggart. The severed hand tripped over a fracture in the flagstones and rolled back up onto its fingertips, this time with a silk top hat and cane, dancing merrily over to Millicent.

"That's creepy enough itself," Millicent muttered in a sour voice. The severed hand changed into an ugly little grey creature bent in on itself with long, yellowing talons on its fingers and toes. Great silver eyes like polished mirrors rolled about in its skull as it clicked pointed teeth the colour of a beetle's wings at her. "_Riddikulus!_"

The boggart changed from the baby gargoyle into a rag-doll with yarn hair, wearing a cheery gingham dress and a blue blouse.

Wobbling over to Seamus on soft brown boots, the dolly-boggart began to grow bigger, desiccated like a corpse, sagging breasts hanging heavy and pendulous from its chest, thin, mossy hair sprouting from its scalp. The banshee staggered forward still wrapped in its grey funeral shroud, a high, eerie wail issuing from its black mouth as brackish saliva dripped down its chin.

"_Riddikulus!_" yelled Seamus, the latest Celestina Warbeck hit now issuing from the banshee's rotting maw.

The boggart sauntered over to Dean Thomas, still in its banshee form. The dark-skinned boy grinned and snagged Harry's sleeve, yanking him in front of the oncoming boggart.

"No way!" yelped Harry, struggling away from the tall boy's firm grip, low voice gone reedy with panic. "Not happening!"

Ron Weasley came up on Harry's free side and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, neatly pinning his flailing arm. "C'mon mate, we'll be right beside you. No better way to face your fears."

Remus started forward, heart crawling up into his throat.

The boggart had already begun to change.

* * *

Blood beat in Harry's ears, the adrenaline-pounding boom of thunder in a rainstorm.

The bright tang of salt and iron flooded his mouth, tongue throbbing where he'd bitten it.

'_Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,'_ Harry thought, the words of Julius Caesar rising unbidden. _'He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.'_

Objectively, he knew his own face. Knew its glass-sharp lines and its wicked, mobile mouth that could bare white teeth a grin that was _anything_ but a smile. He could look in a mirror and say, "That's me."

But Harry was beginning to understand just how much of an act this schoolboy alter ego bullshit really was, not when _this_ was what lurked beneath. It was one thing to see his reflection in the mirror. It was an entirely different matter to watch a living, breathing copy of himself _move_, independent and unselfconscious of his observers.

He hadn't recognized himself – not at first.

His doppelgänger stared back at him with the flat, unblinking gaze of a shark.

"_Riddikulus!"_ Lupin shouted, clearly not believing him capable of dealing with the boggart.

The boggart didn't even flicker. The werewolf might as well have waved his wand and chanted, "Bibbity bobbity boo" for all the good _that_ did.

"Uh, Harry, you going to do anything about that?" Seamus asked, edging away from the boggart. "Now would be a good time."

Harry's double tilted his head, slow and lazy, and regarded Lupin out of the corner of his eye. And then he moved, a razor-edge smile beginning to bloom on his borrowed face, his gait full of languid, predatory indolence and it made Harry shudder, the holly wand growing hot and sparking against his palm. He desperately wished for the surety of his thestral-hair wand and not the relic of yesteryear that was only a step up from useless.

The doppelgänger crowded up into the barriers of Harry's personal space and he couldn't help it. He flinched.

Because this thing wearing his face, this _thing_ that had nothing left but murder and raw edges in his eyes, that couldn't be himself.

Ron nudged him in the side and nodded toward the boggart, unaware of the danger it represented. "Say it. C'mon, mate, say the incantation."

Of course they wouldn't recognize Harry Potter, the famous scar hidden under all that thick grey-black greasepaint, pupils gleaming in the light like an animal's, his lean form made ominous and heavy by all of the thick dragonhide armour, the weapons bristling off his person seeming like strange, alien protrusions. It was just another monster: something that had been dragged out from under the bed by its handlers to walk tamed and leashed among them. See the monster – isn't it a good monster? Don't you want to scratch its ears and rub its belly?

Someone in the group of children crowded around them laughed, a high-pitched giggle of derision.

The boggart smiled back.

Harry's lips peeled away from his teeth as he met his double's acid-green stare.

Something started screaming in his brain and it wasn't even coherent, just a crazed howl of fury – it was that vicious thing with sawblades for teeth and it wanted so _badly_ to stick a knife in his doppelgänger's stomach and yank its guts out onto the floor.

Harry couldn't even manage the incantation around the sound caught in his throat – he just pointed the holly stick and _snarled_.

There was a sound like fabric ripping. The boggart flew back, blasted off its feet hard enough that when it hit the wardrobe, it toppled the whole thing over.

The wardrobe hit the floor with a ground-shaking **thud**, its doors hanging askew.

Harry stumbled back, elbow striking a heavy table pushed next to the wall and he fell against it with a gasp. His hands shook, fury still heating his blood and clanging about his ears like a gong. It felt like there was something sitting on his chest, breath tight and heavy in his lungs.

It wasn't panic.

It couldn't be.

The wardrobe shuddered, the boggart's dying wail ululating between a bird's shriek and the dry cackle of a hyena coughing up a bone.

A blasting curse picked the piece of furniture up in its grasp and flung it against the wall, wood splinters spraying the area like confetti, a drift of dark smoke dissipating into the air.

Harry lowered his arm, the holly wand spitting angry red sparks. Legs folding under him, he collapsed on the floor and rested his head in his hands.

Silence.

Then Lupin spoke, carefully hidden panic filtering through his voice despite the man's better efforts. "Harry?"

He looked up. A heavy frown hung on Lupin's lined face, amber eyes dark and uneasy.

It was the smell of orchids that gave her away first.

"Really Harry, was that necessary?"

Harry tipped his head back and stared at the Faerie Queen perched on the edge of the table, one long, lovely leg crossed over the other. She was wearing another criminal matron ensemble, all sleek grey silks, black pumps, and diamonds.

"Holy shit," he said in disbelief, gaping like an idiot.

Mab tilted her head too, a coy little gesture and clicked her tongue in reproof. "Language, child." She pursed her lips, pure mockery and cruelty. "Have mercy on our poor ears."

Harry scrambled to his feet, getting as much distance from as possible.

Her mulberry lips curled into an iniquitous little grin, a lock of white hair tumbling down from the artful twist of her French pleat. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you seem disappointed to see me."

Harry grimaced, more than a little aware of the eyes fixed upon him and the creature in front of him. They probably thought it was just another form of the boggart.

No boggart he knew of could make the room temperature drop twenty degrees, a lacy framework of ice beginning to creep over the windows.

"_Riddikulus!" _Lupin cried out again.

Harry felt torn between twin urges to laugh and cry, hysterics bubbling away where sanity used to dwell.

Mab flicked a chill green stare over the werewolf, dismissing him in an instant. "Yes, you are," she murmured, her words slow and hushed. "Be still, sir wolf, and I shan't use your pelt to warm my bed."

Lupin's eyes went white around the edges with fear, body as motionless as a statue, pupils flicking frantically back and forth, his mouth frozen in mid-sentence. It became clear that Mab, in a pique of irritation, had simply ceased all non-autonomous movement in the man.

Seamus, the idiot, opened his mouth and found his lips sewn shut, loop-de-loop, with a heavy, silver-gilt thread.

Mab pressed a slim finger to her pursed lips; the dark polish on her too long, too sharp nails winking in the light. "Shhh," she said and clicked her tongue, wagging that same finger at Seamus' pole-axed expression. "Naughty, naughty. Little boys shouldn't say such dirty words to a lady."

The classroom stilled, the children like little rows of wide-eyed china dolls, faces so still and fixed with fascination.

Harry shuddered, breath misting in the chill air of the classroom.

"If at all possible," he rasped, terror closing bony fingers around his throat as he directed the Winter Queen's attention back to himself. "I'd appreciate a warning the next time you decide to show up unannounced."

"Next time?" She said it like Harry had just done something of particularly stupid regard, something worthy of laughter and ridicule. "I sincerely hope you are joking."

Harry took a step forward. "What?" he replied, confusion beginning to eclipse the knee-knocking panic chewing on his nerve-endings.

Mab's expression cooled, her smile turning into a sneer. She uncrossed her legs, heels hitting the ground in a string of staccato **clicks** she stood and straightened the lines of her suit. In those shoes, Mab was eye to eye with him.

"There _should not __**be**_ a _next time_," she hissed, the scent of rime overwhelming the heady aroma of her perfume. Cold light glittered off the long diamond spears of her earrings, the hungry, blue-white aether of Winter's power flickering in the corners of his vision.

"I've made you angry," Harry murmured, eyeing her warily.

Some of Mab's usual smug, feline femininity crept back into her manner and as he watched the edges of her expression light up with mirth, Harry wondered what he'd done to make her look so pleased.

"Harry," she purred, eyes as green as his own gone heavy-lidded, slit pupils blown wide and dark as if with pleasure or drugs. "You didn't think I'd helped you for free?"

Her hands tightened on his forearms and Harry realized he was close enough to cup her elbows in his palms as if he were comforting her. The taste of bile flooded his mouth, his tongue stinging where he'd bitten it.

Harry tried to jerk away, but Mab's long, sharp nails dug into his skin, the Faerie Queen holding him in place as if he didn't have four inches and more than fifty pounds of muscle on her. Little beads of blood welled up where she'd pierced flesh, tiny sparks of pain flaring up and dying.

"I don't understand," he said, the frustrated anger and fear stuck fast in his throat filtering through in a whiskey-rough growl. "I'm doing everything you've asked of me."

"The only thing more fleeting than my patience is time."

"I'm working as fast as I can," Harry bit out through gritted teeth.

Mab laughed; head tipped back in abandonment, the sound rich enough he could almost rub it between his fingers like velvet. Slit-pupiled eyes flickered over the gawking faces behind them before fixing on Harry's murderous stare. "All play and no work, makes Harry a very bad boy today."

"That's not fair," Harry growled. "You are asking me to make rough and hard with a situation that is as _fragile_ as glass."

"Childishness does not become you."

"What are you implying?" he replied. _'Do you really think I would __**fuck around**__ when I know what is to come?'_ Harry bit down on the words before they could leave his tongue.

"You knew very well what you were getting into when you agreed to our deal. I _never_ play fair. The odds are _always_ in my favour. Yet you persist in believing otherwise in an almost perverted desire of hope. Why? Why would you, of all people deserve _hope_?"

She leaned in close, pressing up against him, all sly allure and chill menace. And smiled, wide and sharp and white, the proverbial cat who'd caught the canary, long lashes lowering over her heavy green eyes. "If life was truly fair, you would not see light for a _very long time_."

Harry's hands tightened convulsively on her arms and triumph flared in Mab's eyes as she inhaled, brushing her lips over his own.

"Riddikulus," Mab breathed into his mouth, throaty and satisfied, her smooth face alight with unholy cheer and laughter.

She vanished.

Blood rushed back into his arms where she'd gripped him tight enough to hinder circulation. Light-headed with rage and bone-deep terror, Harry leaned forward and braced his hands on the table, the room around him washed in a frenzied swirl of red.

He closed his eyes and exhaled.

"Harry? Harry, _who_ was that?"

The edges of the desk splintered in his grip.

Lupin's question was merely a guileless query about the absolute fuckery of chaos that had just blown through his classroom with all of the grace of a hurricane.

But the sound that left his mouth when he whirled toward the werewolf… it raised the hairs on the back of Harry's neck.

'_I'm losing it,'_ he thought as he grabbed his books and stalked out of the classroom, ignoring the stricken look on Lupin's face and Seamus' frantic patting at the stitches over his mouth. _'And worse, I'm not the only one who knows it.'_

He could still taste Mab on his lips, something bitter and bright, like lime and mint and hopeless desolation.


	20. Skeleton Hunt IV

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**A/N:** A special thanks and consideration for this chapter goes to VotN, T3t, Lindsey, and Silens Cursor for their insight and commentary. A shout-out also goes to Garden and Sesc for giving me a hand in the editing process. Thank you, thank you, _thank you _13thadaption for going over the multitude of tiny mistakes I usually read over without noticing and thank you for helping me sort out the craziness of this chapter.

And as always, thanks Andro; your help is invaluable. I can always count on you to make me actually _think_ about what I'm writing instead of just blindly following my plot-lines.

Chapter Nineteen

Skeleton Hunt IV

People do stupid things when they panic.

It doesn't matter how well-trained you are or even how experienced you are in the field. Once you've hit that moment of panic, that moment where thought devolves into an incoherent blur of terror, all bets are off. Fear is running the show now, not you, not rationality, and certainly not _anything_ above base instinct.

When life rips the rug from under your feet, humanity tends to react off of an inbuilt biological mechanism designed purely for survival: fight or flight. Rational thought? You don't need no stinkin' rational thought. The brain may be a complicated bit of lights and clockwork, but strip away that veneer of civilization and truthfully? Mankind is little better than animals: If you can't fuck it, you'll fight it. And for all that humans are both furless and fangless against the cold, dark of night and the things that live within – they'll usually win.

Ten thousand years of warfare has ingrained into the _homo sapiens sapiens_ a flair for _violence_ found in no other animal. Man will run, man will attack, man will rack up a body count in _staggering_ numbers. Human instinct might be fight or flight, but sometimes... when your wires are well and truly crossed?

Sometimes, you do a little of both.

It was hard to think when every bone in his body was screaming at him to flee. Harry knew it wouldn't fix things, but… just for a moment? He wanted to run, run from his own name and the cascading piles of shit associated with it. The Winter Queen herself had just waltzed into the one place Harry believed to be a haven against the hungry things knocking at his door and destroyed any illusion of safety or shelter.

What scared him the most wasn't the anger running hot and bright in his blood. Harry could deal with anger, knew it's name and face and how to leash it back where it belonged. Something else scrabbled at the walls of his brain and it smelled a lot like fear.

His hands shook, his breath turning into short gulping gasps as his stride lengthened into a runner's fleet-footed lope away from Lupin's classroom.

He had to get _out_.

His skin itched, the sensation of tiny legs crawling up and down his back and Harry knew that if he stopped to scratch, he'd finish freaking the fuck out – might dig his nails in under his flesh and peel up great bloody scraps of himself.

And_ God, _was it just him or was it getting dark in there?

Harry damn near _flew_ over the stairs.

The group of seventh years didn't look like much more than a fuzzy blear of people, someone trying to grab hold of his arm as he passed.

_Not fucking happening, asshole,_ Harry thought as he snarled into the face of a startled Marcus Flint.

The mirror passageway beckoned to him from the fourth floor as his pulse beat a heavy tattoo in his throat: _freedomfreedomfreedom..._

Stone steps disappeared under his feet as the staircase changed and Harry hurtled over the yawning chasm between stairs and stairwell. His feet touched ground on the fifth-floor landing. Flying past a gaggle of gobsmacked faces, Harry vanished into another secret passageway hidden as part of a stone wall and warded it closed behind him.

Dust swirled up in eddies around his feet in the dim lighting as the passage wound its way downward. It spat him back out just in time to run pell-mell into a startled group of Slytherins.

Harry took a shoulder to the chest and for a moment, it felt as if someone had driven a lorry into his breastbone with the intention of crushing his lungs against his spine.

Stumbling back from the tangle of bodies, Harry bumped into the wall he'd just darted out of, stone biting at the sharp points of his shoulder blades. His thighs trembled, muscles too loose and rubbery like his knees might give in and dump him on the floor. The mirror passage sat at the end of the wide corridor, half-hidden in a small alcove.

Pushing himself off the wall – one-way passages were a bitch to get around – Harry sidestepped the clump of people picking themselves up from the floor and –

Impact knocked the breath from his lungs.

He spat the taste of blood from his mouth. Little red droplets sizzled as they hit the floor under his hands, the magnesium flare of magic sparking against his fingertips and pitting the stone with tiny pockmarks.

How the fuck had he gotten down here?

Harry made to stand up from his slack-limbed sprawl and something tightened its grip on his ankle. He glanced over his shoulder.

A large, dark-eyed boy, whose shoulders strained against the lines of his robes, grinned at him. "Going somewhere?" he asked as the smell of dark magic rose in the air.

_Scrap metal gleams in the snow beyond the circle of Death Eaters around him. _

_He can't feel his legs._

_Not long now._

_Harry starts to laugh, wet and thick, blood slicking his chin with warm dampness. He'll drag them _all_ into Hell with him and he'll do it with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. "Die," he says, voice raspy and scraped raw as the sound of dark water gurgles hungrily in his ears. "Die screaming."_

_Red-orange streaks of light leave spots in his vision as the spheres shoot off in different directions. _

_A fission of unrest shudders through the circle of Death Eaters. One bright soul hastily conjures a shield, white mask hanging loose around his neck, dark eyes fixed warily upon Harry._

_And just before the worlds explodes in a lightning-strike blast of heat and light, he gets a good look at the guy: Broad and conventionally handsome, the dark-eyed man is tall and built as if in a different world where they weren't all on the knife's edge of starvation, he'd be heavy-set, soft in the belly from lush appetites and too little exercise._

Harry's knuckles stung, a trickle of blood dripping down one of his fingers where the skin split.

There was a stunned group of faces surrounding him. "What did you do that for?" one them asked, a weedy blond boy with a patchy scruff of stubble on his chin. "He was just gonna thrash you around a bit – nothing more than you deserve for running into us like that."

The Death Eater picked himself up off the floor, nose broken and leaking blood, the skin of his face gone an angry, mottled red.

_You were there,_ Harry thought. _You were there at the end. Why did you survive when so many others died who deserved life more than a fucking _leech_ like you?_

Harry shook off the green and black clad arms that were restraining him and then the Death Eater was picking himself up off the floor again.

Deja fucking vu.

Ozone burned the inside of Harry's nose and he sidestepped a hex that singed the air behind it a harsh red-orange.

_Walk away, Potter,_ whispered the last line of reason inside himself. _Walk away before you do something you regret._

Harry made the mistake of glancing at the mirror again.

The hair rose on the back of his neck. Harry turned, banishing the low-level pain curse back at its caster. The Death Eater bit off a choked cry, rage burning in his eyes as he raised his wand again.

Whatever awareness that had momentarily surfaced sank back under the hot tide of anger in Harry's blood.

Thin tendrils of stone grew out of the floor, winding their way up the Slytherin's legs, growing long, needle-sharp thorns that dug into his skin beneath his heavy robes. Damp flowers of blood darkened the boy's robes where the thorns bit in.

The Death Eater drew back his arm, an ugly light blooming on the end of his wand. Riding the wave of the Death Eater's – _Bletchley's_ – anger, Harry slipped into the soft, meaty flesh of his mind.

Bletchley's thoughts were tinged the rusty colour of dried blood and the cold, waxy-pale shades of an Inferi's skin. There were dead girls, chest split open between their breasts, heart spilling out onto the come-stripped sheets under them. Harry watched as thirteen-year-old Miles Bletchley climbed onto his uncle's corpse and rubbed himself to completion. The twisted little fucker squirmed in his chair throughout the funeral afterwards against the chilly slide of come on the inside of his robes, a little thrill of excitement running through him at the memory of stuffing his wet underwear under the satin pillow of his uncle's coffin.

Bone clicked and clacked as seven-year-old Miles Bletchley dismembered the family cat, one mewling piece at a time. Sinking deeper into the mire, Harry followed the thick chain of lust and psychosis to its anchor. It was a pulsing thing, somehow living and breathing independent of Bletchley's mind, a dual heartbeat thumping in time with its owner's. Muscle grew over a mechanical heart dotted with iron spikes, all red and wet and flayed of its protective layer of epidermis.

Harry reached out, thought-hands clad in sleek black dragonhide, and sank his fingers into the throbbing bundle of raw, miserable flesh and mechanics, shattering the iron spikes, wickedly curved hooks, chain lengths and willing them all into dust. But before he could untangle the angry mass of flesh from Bletchley's metal heart, Harry found himself forcefully ejected.

Refocusing his sight on the physical world, Harry stared eye to eye with Severus Snape's furious black gaze.

"_What do you think you're doing?_" the potion's master hissed, shaking Harry by his shoulder like a rag-doll. "Foolish boy! You could have killed him!"

Harry glanced down at Bletchley's disoriented form crumpled on the floor, surrounded by broken stone that used to be thorny vines, blood dribbling out of his nose and from his tear ducts. It dripped off his chin and from his ears, staining the collar of the crisp white button-down he wore under his school robes. The teenager was a wolf pup in a box full of floppy-eared puppies. They all had sharp little baby teeth – felt like fucking needles if they got in a nip at your skin – but only one of the pack was a bred-to-the-bone predator. Only one was going rabid.

_No big loss_, he thought and it must have showed on his face because Snape shook him again.

"You stupid child – do you ever _think_ before you _act_?" Snape snarled in his ear.

"I wonder if his girlfriend ever thought something was wrong when he asked her to hold real still under a bunch of cooling charms when he fucked her," Harry replied without any real inflection. "Or did you think she has her own kinks when it comes to cadavers? No pun intended of course."

Snape recoiled, pinching grip loosening from Harry's shoulder.

Bletchley's face whitened into a moue of horror. "I don't-"

"Know what I'm talking about?" Harry smiled, glancing at Severus Snape's carefully shuttered expression out of the corner of his eye. "Don't worry. _I do_," he purred to Bletchley as one of his buddies helped him up from his sprawl on the floor. "It wasn't the sensation of dead flesh that got you off when you bounced on your uncle's prick like it was a pony. It was that _little-_" Harry drew the word out. "_Tiny_ trickle of blood that welled up from his mouth as you rode his insides to mush. And the memory alone still makes you cream your shorts three years later."

"That's enough, Potter," Snape murmured.

Harry bared his teeth. "You don't even have to touch yourself to get off. All you have to think about is good old Uncle Fester's stiff dick and even stiffer corpse-"

One of Bletchley's friends made an involuntary retching noise, a lanky teen with frizzy brown hair that wanted to be long, but somehow only managed to be wide instead.

"His name wasn't Fester!" Bletchley yelled, turning an unpleasant shade of purple as his buddies shuffled in place, most looking as if they'd like to be as far away from him as possible.

Harry didn't bother to hide the triumph on his face. Oldest trick in the book and it still worked with undeniable flair.

"_Enough!_" Snape roared at both of them, his hand clamping down on the thick muscle of Harry's upper arm as he shook him. For such a skinny man, Snape was startlingly strong.

_Must be all of that cauldron stirring_, Harry thought as the potion's master dismissed Bletchley and his crew of budding young thugs. Bunch of fucking morons that didn't know what the bullshit they upheld really meant or who the wild-eyed teenager they idolized really was – ignorance wasn't bliss, it was abject stupidity.

_Don't eat the propaganda, Alice,_ Harry mused as he swayed in Snape's grasp. _It'll make you quite big, then it'll make you quite small, and then it will chew on you until you're nothing at all. _

"_I_ will handle it," Snape repeated himself over the Slytherins' protests. "And I will see you in my office later. Seven sharp," Snape barked when Bletchley opened his mouth again, a cold black stare pinning the boy where he stood.

The two of them watched the group of students clear out of the hallway, a few throwing unreadable looks at Harry over their shoulders as they crowded around Bletchley. Snape's grip on his arm remained unrelenting. Disgust sat thick and cloying in Harry's throat and it was only by a bare semblance of control over his temper that kept him from lashing out at Snape, an unnatural stillness hovering in the air between them.

_You should have let me finish,_ Harry thought, watching the potion's master from under heavy lids. _You knew exactly what he was capable of. Oh sure, you didn't know _all_ of the dirty details, but you knew. You knew Bletchley was a sick fuck and you didn't need _me_ to tell you that._

Snape released his arm, whirling away from Harry in swirl of black, potion-stained robes. Dark eyes glittered with something that might have been rage, but it was tempered with a good deal of wariness.

"Follow me," he said, stalking down the hall.

Harry's feet felt glued to the floor. "What about your classes?"

The potion's master seemed on the verge of saying something unkind when realization dawned on the irritable angles of his face. "Flint will take care of them," he said, brusquely pushing aside Harry's simple curiosity.

The trek to the Headmaster's office was made in silence. A couple of curious students gawked at them as they passed and Harry knew with a sinking surety that news of his fuck-up in Lupin's classroom was well on its way around the school.

Head still spinning from the adrenaline rush and not a little bit from Dumbledore's whirl-a-twirl staircase, Harry dropped into the stiff-backed chair in the small antechamber outside the headmaster's office. Snape tapped twice on the door, disappearing behind it after throwing Harry a warning look over his shoulder.

But before the door swung to, Harry caught a glimpse of Lupin sitting in front of Dumbledore's desk, amber eyes catching his own as the werewolf turned in his chair. The headmaster lifted his wand, disappointment turning his usually amicable face into stern, implacable lines as he watched Harry from beyond the confines of the doorway. Then the crisp, tooth-buzzing crackle of wards dropped over the antechamber and the door sealed itself shut.

Harry's fists clenched on the worn denim of his thighs. They hadn't warded off the office.

They'd caged him in.

* * *

This wasn't the same Harry he'd known before the summer holidays, even if Albus couldn't put his finger on the exact reason why. The boy had been replaced by a silver-tongued chameleon, who could change faces faster than a skilled Thespian and held no connection at all to his friends save by the old edge of grief and past-memory. It was evident in the words he spoke and the way he acted, something like wistful longing shining on his visage.

"The woman," said Remus, unable to keep the bewildered surprise from his voice. "Her interaction with him was… intimate."

Albus' brows climbed his forehead. "Intimate? I'm afraid I don't understand you."

Remus moistened his lips before replying. "I was uncomfortable watching them. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was the prelude to relations much less wholesome for a thirteen-year-old boy. I think she represents someone who has hurt Harry."

Albus Dumbledore liked the implications of what had occurred in Remus' classroom less and less the more he heard of them. A dangerous sort of rage curled within him at the idea of someone hurting young Harry in such repulsive ways and it surprised him how hot his anger burned. Albus carefully folded away his fury before it could permeate his better senses. There was a time and place for anger and this was not it.

Severus' dark form slipped into the room, an abundance of silencing charms and wards preventing the sounds of their conversation from leaving his office. Albus caught a glimpse of Harry perched on the edge of a chair in the antechamber, so still and glassy-eyed despite the turbulent dark magic thrumming in the air around him.

The door sealed itself shut. Remus turned back around in his seat. "Do you see now why I'm concerned? That's not normal behaviour for a boy of any age."

"You have much bigger problems to worry about," Severus announced flatly, coming to a halt in front of Albus' desk. "I just found Potter on the fourth floor in the process of separating Miles Bletchley's mind into its subsequent components."

Alarm skittered over Albus' nerves. "He _attacked_ another student?"

Severus barred yellow teeth in an ugly grin. "Even better. I'd say he intended to kill him."

A muscle ticked in Remus' jaw.

Something brushed over the wards and Albus realized that Harry had been steadily dismembering them since the door shut. A shudder ran up his spine as the slippery sensation of dark magic began to _eat_ its way through the sturdy ward-lines guarding the doorway.

"Where is Mr. Bletchley?" demanded Albus, not bothering to hide the command in his voice.

"I remanded him into the care of his fan club," replied Severus. Disdain and not a small amount of venom coated his words. "Potter was gracious enough to begin removing Bletchley's more twisted desires and I have half a mind to shake the brat's hand for it."

"So Mr Bletchley is not in as dire straits as you would have me believe?"

"He is." A dark note glittered in Severus' eyes. "If I had not come along when I had, I am certain that Potter would not have stopped until Bletchley was nothing more than a drooling shell on the floor."

Unable to completely smother his expression of shocked horror, Albus pressed a hand over his mouth under the guise of brushing off his beard.

"It appears that Potter was only attacking the parts of the boy's mind he will be better off without," Severus amended. "But I have no doubt that we will be hearing from his parents before the day is over with. Miles Bletchley is not the sort to let an insult slide without prompt retaliation."

"Why? Why would Harry do something like that?" asked Remus, his confusion and worry turning the words sharper than he'd probably intended.

There was something deeply _wrong_ with Harry Potter. There was something deeply wrong with Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore didn't know where to start pointing fingers and assigning blame.

There was a very good chance that Albus' own name sat at the top of that list.

"At what point in your class did Harry's behaviour change?" asked Albus, looking Remus in the eye.

"I..." Remus rubbed a hand over his nose. Then he blinked and sat up ramrod straight. "It was after the boggart focused its attention on him and changed. Harry was initially shocked by what it turned into – I'm sure of it. But he did not turn aggressive until the boggart approached him and... I was sure that he had destroyed it."

"But," Albus prompted Remus to finish his half-formed recollection.

"When the woman appeared, she spoke of such strange things..." Remus trailed off. "Honestly, taken out of context..." The young werewolf shook his head, a mirthless huff of air escaping him. "It's almost as if she was threatening him."

Propping his chin up on a single half-curled fist, Albus studied the light outside the window as he sifted through the muddle of fragmented information in his mind. "You say...that Harry had already destroyed the boggart by the time she appeared?" asked Albus, returning to the heart of what was bothering him.

Severus jerked his head from where he'd been studying the titles of Albus' bookshelves.

"I thought he had, barring how improbable it is that he's able to cast such magic," Remus replied. "The... _thing_ that appeared after his display of anger was so different than what the other children dreamed up. I've never seen a boggart talk before, let alone interact with its chosen victim."

"It talked?" Severus asked, his tone clipped short and sharp with something Albus couldn't quite call apprehension. "As in actual interaction with Potter?"

Remus blinked. "Yes?"

"Then it was not a boggart," said Severus. "Boggarts can mimic human sounds, but they are incapable of holding intelligent conversations. They are thoughts and dream fragments; they have no distinct mind of their own." The _even you should have known that, you blithering moron_ went unsaid, but it was clearly understood by everyone in the room.

"I'd hoped otherwise," Remus said with a grimace. "I should have known better when I realized how odd she smelled, though it was hard to tell her apart from Harry's own scent."

Surprisingly enough, Severus said nothing in response to Remus' commentary on his extraordinary senses.

"Harry carries a strong undercurrent of ozone and a hard, almost metallic tang under his normal smells of soap and sweat," Remus explained, his expression a bit distant as he recalled the details of his encounter with James' son. "Not unpleasant, but it's noticeable. What struck me the most, aside from the frost on the classroom windows, they shared a certain brittle sort of scent, almost... _cold_, if such a thing is possible.

"It was the strongest," Remus continued. "After she cursed both myself and the Finnegan boy."

_Dear God, no._ Albus rarely doubted his hunches, but for once he wished he had been wrong. "Did she have a rather distinctive perfume?" he asked, the taste of fear as strong as bile in the back of his mouth. "Like orchids perhaps?"

Remus Lupin stared, startled and a bit nervous at that. "Yes, just like. How did you know?"

"This woman, she would be quite striking in appearance: tall, pale with white hair and green eyes? She might also have worn opals or maybe diamonds?" asked Severus, picking up on Albus' train of thought.

"Should I know this person?" Remus asked, blinking in confusion.

"Her name is Mab." There was a hoarse note in Severus' voice, like it had been scraped from the rocky bottom of a well. "And _do not_ repeat it because like as not, she'll take that as an invitation to show up."

"Somebody masquerading as _Mab_ showed up in my classroom?" said Remus.

Severus' lip curled. "Say her name again and you may just get to meet her face to face."

"I assure you, that was no masquerade, Remus," said Albus. "I sincerely doubt that anything less than the Winter Queen in the living flesh would be able to make it through the castle wards."

"Again, why? Why would she be interested in Harry?" asked Remus, bewildered.

"More than that," Severus muttered. "Why the hell would she show up here?"

"I would like an answer to that question as well," agreed Albus. "I think it's safe to say that today is not the first time they've met."

The Winter Queen had a habit of recruiting, or better yet, _collecting _powerful young witches and wizards into her cortege. Many of the individuals that made up her court were once human or almost human hundreds of years ago – Harry would not be the first Sharr progeny to become entangled in Mab's claws.

"My knowledge of the Winter Queen is limited to myth and somewhat circumspect historical references," said Albus, spreading his hands. "But I am certain that if Mab has not already twisted Harry into one of her creatures, she will soon. What will emerge from her clutches will bear little resemblance to anything human, not in thought, not in desire, and certainly not in power."

"But Harry is just a boy – he hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of his magical education," replied Remus. "What good is he to her?"

"The younger, the better," Severus muttered.

"The minds and hearts of children are more malleable than men," agreed Albus. "And Harry, being so desperate for acceptance, I'm afraid she would find him easy prey."

Albus rarely felt panic, but this? This made his hands shake and his mind to race in endless circles of what-ifs. Not this boy, please no, not _Harry_. He'd already been through enough. A troubled childhood and an equally troubled inheritance, an uncle that was most likely mad and violent, a dark lord with Harry's name at the top of his hit list and now Mab, a creature who had been a herald of darkness and death since the conception of time – Albus could not have conceived a more potent recipe for disaster.

It was no wonder that the boy was lashing out at those who should have been his peers.

"Headmaster." Severus' dark eyes were hard and unflinchingly honest. "You cannot blame his actions purely on outside forces. I can accept that Potter was provoked. But the way he assaulted Bletchley smacks of experience. He's done this before – successfully. No matter how much you might wish to believe otherwise, he still chose to do harm through his own free will."

Albus dipped his head in agreement. Fact remained that if the boy knew _these_ spells, there was a good chance he knew others that were far less destructive: a shield charm or a banishing hex, and there were at least twenty different varieties of each. Even if he had been defending himself, there was no reason why utter annihilation should be the first thing he reached for.

"You cannot be thinking to allow the boy to stay here," Severus continued lowly. "Not in good conscience can you allow him around children who are incapable of defending themselves against him should he go off the rails. Bletchley is sixteen years old and what he lacks in experience, he makes up in skill and raw talent. He should have been more than a match for Potter. Instead, the boy swatted him down like a bug. Think of what he could do to somebody else, somebody even less prepared to deal with the fallout of Potter's rages."

"Where else would you have me put him? I lack an easy solution," Albus replied, understanding the exact nuances of Severus' concerns, but also aware of how limited his options truly were. "I could expel him, but that would leave him vulnerable to the machinations of Lucius and his ilk. I could suspend him and sequester him away in the unused parts of the castle, but I can only punish him if he consents to be constrained."

At Severus' incredulous look, Albus clarified his point further. "What is to keep him from simply _disappearing_ from Hogwarts one day? As easily as he vanished from his home this summer, what would prevent him from doing the same here? I cannot remand him into the care of his relatives for that same reason. And I _cannot_ allow him to fall back under the influence of Hadrian Sharr, who is very likely the true root of Harry's new-found thirst for violence."

"Who? A Sharr?" asked Remus, perplexed. "But they're dead."

Severus' lips whitened. "I refuse to believe that man is of any relation to Lily Evans."

"Relation?" Remus gasped. "What the hell is going on here? _Who is Hadrian Sharr?_"

Albus did not like keeping secrets from someone as deeply involved with the Potter family as Remus Lupin, but he desperately needed an unbiased point of view regarding Harry's actions, both past and present.

"Be that as it may," said Albus in reply to Severus' staunch denial. "You cannot deny the fact that Harry disappeared with him after an assault on Privet Drive that left eight dead."

"Knowing what you do now, how can you say for sure that Potter didn't have a hand in that as well?" Severus bit out in return.

Remus whirled around in his chair, lips twisted into a snarl. "My God, Severus. He's _thirteen_. Not the devil reborn."

"You'd be surprised at what some thirteen-year-olds are capable of," Severus replied, his voice gone acerbic with a grim sort of humour. "The boy who would become the Dark Lord was even younger when he got his first taste of dark magic. And there are students here at Hogwarts who have perversions that would make your skin crawl."

"Perhaps I have a bit more faith in them than you," Remus snapped. "Do you ever stop to think of what these children might be able to do with a bit of encouragement instead of mistrust and wariness?"

The young man could not have been more obvious that he was referring to himself and his own treatment at the hands of the wizarding world – however circumspect he may have been about his lycanthropy, suspicions were suspicions and Remus Lupin was a registered werewolf. Jobs were not easy to come by. The ignorance of Hogwarts' students of his condition shielded Remus to a degree, but it was only a matter of time before his secret was found out.

"Every day," replied Severus flatly and Albus wasn't sure if he was alluding to Remus, or to his own Slytherin charges.

"Gentlemen," Albus intoned, a warning in his voice. "We have a very narrow window of opportunity to help Harry while he is still free from the grasp of outside parties. _Do not squander this chance on petty squabbles_."

"Headmaster, he was going to kill Bletchley. Not maim, not injure, not humiliate – _he was going to kill him_. Your insistence on second chances will not behove you here. If you can't rein the boy in, he should not be around the other students," stated Severus. "Potter doesn't need a wand to be a danger to those around him and what's more, you cannot predict what he's going to do next."

Remus stood suddenly, knocking his squat, heavy armchair off-kilter on two legs before it thumped back down. "Is this your _concern_ speaking? Or is this left over from your damned feud with his father?"

"How much more proof do you need, Lupin?" Severus snarled in reply. "How far does he have to go before you begin to understand what he is capable of? Kill a few dementors? Possibly even murder a few people in cold blood? How about an Unseelie Queen wandering through your classroom? Better yet, how about an assault on another student?"

"I'm not ignoring what he's done!" Red spots of anger bloomed high on Remus' cheeks. "I'm just not willing to condemn him over what he _might_ have done."

Severus' voice was whisper soft, but no less vehement. "Black was sixteen when he first tried to murder another person. Look where he is now. Potter is only thirteen. Where do you think _he_ will end up? What good will it do to coddle him? Especially when he's tasted blood and it's obvious he's craving more."

"_Perhaps_ we should let Harry weigh in on things before we get ahead of ourselves," said Albus, nodding to the person standing behind the quarrelling duo.

A dispassionate green gaze flicked over the tableau and dismissed it. Harry stared back at Albus from the doorway, broken wards bleeding sparks of electricity in the air around him. He raised a hand, made a pinching motion with his fingers, and drew his hand down slowly, dragging the rest of the temporary wards over the antechamber down with it.

The lambent sparks of magic vanished.

Albus watched Harry Potter sit down in front of him for the second time that day, the encroaching afternoon storms replacing bright mid-morning skies. But this Harry, this _version_ of Harry bore little resemblance to the self-effacing young man of this morning. And would this Harry be anymore truthful than the last? Would the presence of more people somehow trip him up in his half-truths and misleading statements? It was as if the boy who had returned to Hogwarts was not Harry at all, but a changeling sent to take his place.

An elf clad in a purple tea towel popped into Albus' office bearing a silver platter of finger sandwiches and fresh fruit. "Here you go, sirs! Can Ada be bringing you anything else?"

"No Miss Ada. This will be to our satisfaction," Albus replied.

More than anything, it was Harry's small smile and "thank you" to the house elf that convinced Albus it was still Harry who sat before him and not a trickster of Mab's court. The way he'd attacked the dementors spoke of a distinct lack of empathy toward another living creature – however despicable the dementors' existence was aside. This small kindness though, this left Albus hope that there was still something inside the boy that could actually _feel_ human emotion and not just mimic some sham thereof.

Harry had changed so much Albus despaired of ever learning the real reason why. For one, how on earth had Harry learned Legilimency? He wasn't even aware that the boy _knew_ of the obscure art – to say nothing of the fact that one needed to have a half-way decent grasp of Occlumency in order to prepare their mind for offensive psyche-based attacks. And how had he done this in less than three months?

It was a silly question, because that was impossible.

Simply put, Harry _hadn't_ learned these things over the summer. There was a very good chance that between Hadrian Sharr and Mab of the Unseelie, the boy had spent some time in the Otherlands under the care of the Winter Court. Which would explain the presence of Winter in the boy's scent and also why he was so much larger than most of his peers – time moved in odd disparities between the Courts and the mortal world. Legend spoke of how days could slip by in a blink and at other moments, time would drift by with all the languorous somnolence of deep, slow-moving river in January. The boy might be thirteen in mortal years, but...

No wonder he struggled to connect with his friends. They might very well be strangers to him.

Put all together, this information meant that the majority of Harry's changes had come from outside forces – one of whom had already presented her face, and another who lurked in the shadows under the mysterious claim of 'blood relation'.

But how many more were involved? There were too many ephemeral _maybes_ and _could bes_ and _mights._ Albus Dumbledore had never been a fan of high-stake guessing games, which was why he avoided politics if at all possible.

"Harry," Albus said quietly as oblique green eyes met his own without fear. "I think you and I need to have a serious discussion about what actually happened this summer."

Harry raised an eyebrow, glancing in question to Severus and Remus who remained silent observers of the conversation.

"And this time," Albus continued. "Calls for a bit of honesty on your part."

"I didn't lie to you," Harry replied, a curt note coming into his voice.

"Omitting and distorting the truth for the sake of deception is the same as lying, Harry."

"I'm curious, Professor," said Harry in that oddly deep baritone that had been bothering Albus ever since he'd first heard the boy speak. "Why would you ever think I'd talk freely about the private details of my life in front of two people I neither know nor trust?"

"When a student of mine endangers others, I have to take actions that I don't necessarily feel comfortable with or enjoy," Albus replied. "It was your choices and your actions that brought you here, for you found it all too easy to lie to me in a more casual setting."

"It was not my _intention_ to lie to you." His words emerged lower, shakier than before, almost vibrating with emotion – Harry did not like being accused of lying. Nobody did, but for some reason it struck deeper here.

"Yet you did," Albus replied without accusation. "And to my dismay, _I_ found it all too easy to let you lie to me." He felt of low pang of disappointment at how manipulative Harry's behaviour had become. And how easily the young man had found it to take advantage of his concern. It was a sort of callousness that reeked of psychopathy.

Remus leaned toward Harry. "Please, let us help you. We may be able to lighten your load, but you'll have to be honest with us."

The boy's behaviour made an abrupt turnabout and it was as if something with teeth and claws had been startled from its nap in the sun. "I'm sorry, who the _hell_ are you and why are you here?" said Harry, irritation and confusion vying for dominance in his expression.

Severus snorted with amusement.

"My apologies for interrupting your lesson today, Professor Lupin," said Harry. "I didn't mean to derail things so horribly. But that doesn't change the fact that you are a complete and total stranger to me. I know why he cares –" Harry gestured to Albus. "It's his _job_. Professor Snape is here because he wants to be the first person to dance on my grave and I'll happily consign the honour to him. But I don't know _you_. Why are _you_ here?"

"Your father – "

"Was an utter asshole," Harry replied.

"He finally sees the light," Severus muttered.

Remus shot the dour man a dirty look. "– Was one of my best friends and – "

"A ringing endorsement of your character, no doubt," said Harry, picking up one of the small sandwiches and eating half of it in one bite.

It was an alarming indicator of much Harry had changed that when the boy felt cornered, he lashed out at others, turning from polite artifice to belligerence and antagonism.

Yet, interesting how it was Remus Lupin that roused Harry's anger and not Severus, who had a history of ill relations with him. Where did such fury come from? And why, of all places, did it spring up _here_? Albus was under the impression Harry had not known of Remus' connection to his parents.

Remus gritted his teeth, his expression becoming pained. "Your father trusted me with looking after you - "

Harry interrupted him again, bitter anger slipping through the cracks in his nonchalant façade. "Which was a duty you've readily shirked for twelve years now. At least Sirius had an excuse for not being there. What's yours?"

_Ah,_ thought Albus. _You feel like you were abandoned into the care of the Dursleys. No wonder you disappeared with Hadrian Sharr – he might well have been the first person to show interest in your well-being for years. _

Naked grief flashed across Remus' face. "Part of the blame for James' death lies on my shoulders -"

"And part of it also lies on the shoulders of Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, and Tom fucking Riddle, Jr," Harry snapped. "You could also go so far as to say that part of the blame also lies on my parents for defying Voldemort in the first place. So why don't you cut the bullshit?"

Severus Snape. My parents _defying_ Voldemort.

_'He knows,'_ Albus thought. _'Somehow, he knows.'_

The angry young man sitting before him knew damn well who and what Remus Lupin was. He knew the prophecy and he knew who had heard it. He knew Albus had convinced his parents to go into hiding and he knew of the Fidelius charm.

And Albus had a sinking feeling he knew exactly who had told Harry of these things.

But _how_? How had Hadrian Sharr known? For that matter, _who_ had told _him_?

"The real reason why you didn't show your face for over a decade isn't just grief," Harry purred, eyes agleam with something Albus didn't want to name. It looked too much like satisfaction. "It's fear and guilt and self-loathing. And you've _wallowed_ in it."

Remus lost it, Harry being just as skilled as Severus at finding the young werewolf's buttons and wailing on them with the psychological equivalent of a steel mallet. "You're not the only one who's suffered because of their loss! _Don't_ you **ever** accuse me of wallowing in self-pity!"

"_I lost a hell of a lot more that night than you ever did!"_ Harry bellowed back, the rooms ringing with the strength of his voice. Even the mutter of the portraits had gone silent. Remus' jaw clicked shut.

"I lost my mother," Harry murmured, the sound low and hard. "I lost my father. I lost my godfather. I lost my _home_. I lost any chance I might have had at growing up with people who loved me. And I lost _you_ to selfish self-pity. So yeah, Lupin, you wallowed. As far as I'm concerned?"

Harry leaned forward into Remus' face, his words so forceful they were almost hissed. "Anything you do now is too little, too late. The only bearing you have on this situation is as a professor who was injured as a result of my actions in class. Don't pretend to be concerned when the only thing you're after is absolution for your absent sense of responsibility."

"Then by your own words, wouldn't I also be remiss in my responsibilities if I allowed you to attack another student without penalty?" Albus replied into the cloying hush of the room.

Harry's hands tightened on the armrests of his chair as he silently turned to face Albus.

"Why would you feel it necessary to injure Mr. Bletchley?" Albus tipped his head and met Harry's cool stare over the rims of his spectacles. "You are facing a serious enquiry for your actions. Be very careful where you go from here."

"There were more of them than there was of me," was Harry's short reply.

"Yet you did not assail his companions," said Albus, willing to match wits with the boy if that was what it took to extract the truth from him. "You focused your attack solely on Miles Bletchley."

"He attacked me first."

"And why exactly did he warrant such retaliation from you? Self-defence is one thing Harry. Aggravated assault is another."

"Considering the kind of curses he threw at me, why am I in here and he's not?" There was a distinct lack of petulance in the chill aplomb of Harry's voice.

"I will be interviewing Mr. Bletchley later once Professor Snape has determined whether or not he needs medical assistance," said Albus. "However, it is _your_ actions that have given me the most cause for concern. I know where Miles Bletchley learned his dogma. Yet I have no similar explanation for _why_ or _where_ you were taught that such behaviour is acceptable."

Harry was silent.

Albus suppressed the sigh rising in his chest. "We are all responsible for what we do – whatever feelings you have towards Mr. Bletchley do not give you licence to maim. There is something you're not telling me. I'm asking you again, _why_ would you feel it necessary – "

"To put down Bletchley like the rabid dog he is? Trust me, professor, the world will be much better off without him."

Remus Lupin jerked back in his chair away from the boy.

A pair of white-knuckled hands yanked Harry's chair around to confront Severus' furious, pinch-lipped stare._ "Who are you to cast such judgement?"_ Severus snarled into the boy's face.

Harry's mouth curved into something that could almost be called a smile. "Because you lack the balls to do it yourself even though you _know_ that his life means the death of a lot of good people. He doesn't deserve a second chance."

Harry's words were said with the same cool calm as before, but they were heavy with the sort of undeniable gravity that said, _this _was what Harry believed to be**true**, that Miles Bletchley deserved to die based on personal politics and unfortunate psychosis.

"There are those who would say the same about you," murmured Severus.

The young man didn't even flinch. "So be it."

"What will you do, I wonder," mused Severus in a low, mock-thoughtful tone. "With everyone else who disagrees with your way of thinking?"

"Nothing," Harry replied as if the question hadn't even bothered him. "If they don't hurt me, I don't hurt them."

Severus' response was desert-dry and sardonic. "How reasonable."

"I can be," said Harry with an almost pleasant manner, a small and clearly artificial smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"Harry," said Albus, redirecting the conversation back to its original goal. "I am _very_ aware that the conflicts in Hogwarts and the lines dividing them are a reflection of the conflicts and party lines in the wizarding world at large."

Harry tipped his head to the side, that indulgent little curl of the lip not leaving his face.

Albus frowned. "Yet I am beholden to this school to protect its students – even if it is from each other – and I will not in good conscience allow someone of your calibre, and your obvious willingness to injure others, free run of Hogwarts. I must have a place where _all_ of my students are safe amongst their own peers."

"Professor," Harry began, his defiant expression replaced with worry and something that could almost be termed 'compassion'. "I hold no malice towards the students of this school. Bletchley was an exception to the rule. I know that you feel my actions are in the wrong – "

Severus opened his mouth and Harry cut him off, raising a hand sharply in dismissal.

"... and maybe they were," Harry continued, his manner focused and dead serious. "But the fact remains that it is easier for someone like me to take decisive action than for you to eliminate a threat to your students like Bletchley. Say what you will about what I've done. But Bletchley? He actively preys on people. His tastes run towards young Muggle women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. And let me tell you, sir – he's worked his way through more than a few."

"Do you have any proof of your accusations?" asked Albus, not sure which unsettled him more: the idea that one of his students was a potential serial killer or that he had pair of budding young psychopaths on his hands.

Harry's jaw tightened. "At the moment? No. I've only just found out about it. But I bet if I went and took a look at missing persons reports in London, I'd find that a large number of young women have gone missing from there over the last seven months and nobody will have any good leads as to who or what happened to them. Bletchley's a smart fucker – he's been using the city as his hunting grounds 'cause who's going to question someone disappearing in London?"

Leaning forward, Harry gripped the edges of the desk as he was keeping himself from launching himself off the chair after Miles Bletchley. "I also have a hunch that he's been feeding the remains to the family pets – the Bletchleys being the leading griffon breeders of northern Europe – and that you will probably find an abundance of human bone fragments in the feeding pens."

Albus smoothed the flyaway hairs of his moustache from his mouth as he mused over his options. The chiming of his clock seemed exceptionally loud in the silence of the room, three pairs of expectant eyes pinned on his form.

"Severus," Albus said into heavy hush of the office. "I am reluctant to ask such a thing of you, but when you question Miles Bletchley – "

_Could_ he ask such a thing of Severus?

No. It was a cowardly to assign him a task Albus did not want himself – no matter how repugnant the idea of invading Miles Bletchley's mind was to him, it remained Albus' responsibility to investigate Harry's accusations.

"I will look into the veracity of Potter's claims," replied Severus.

Albus shook his head. "No. I will be there myself. I cannot disregard an accusation of this nature, despite the manner in which such information was acquired."

Harry's lips thinned with frustration. "I refuse to feel guilty for bringing to light a danger you had _no idea _even existed until five minutes ago. How long do you think it would be before Bletchley started to go after the younger students here if I hadn't told you that he's a sick son of a bitch?"

"And _that_ is why I am unable to trust you or your judgement any longer." The sharp, thunderstorm smell of dark magic had thickened to the point where Albus felt his eyes begin to water. Albus folded his hands on his desk to keep from grasping his wand as he remembered how easily Harry shattered the wards that should have contained him. "Harry, you lack remorse, for what could have been the death of a student and on top of that, you also lack remorse for violating him in one of the worse ways imaginable."

"Are you – " said Harry, his expression showing the beginnings of shell-shock. "Are you accusing me of _rape_?"

Rain pattered against the windowsill, the brewing storm settling in for the afternoon.

Albus stared over the rims of his glasses at the young man before him. "I am telling you that what you did should be abhorrent to you."

Knowing that if he cornered Harry, the young Sharr would dissemble a great quantity of absolute malarkey and disappear as readily as he had appeared on Platform 9 ¾, Albus proceeded with caution. "I know that you are battling the sort of internal demons that most do not face until much later in life. I know that you fear your demons a great deal and that on occasion, these urges will over-rule better judgement despite how hard you try to keep them locked away. I also know that I can't make you tell me why or how they came to exist," said Albus, watching a flurry of emotions cross Harry's face.

The amount of dark magic coming off of Harry warped the shadows of the room, inky wisps of darkness writhing where they shouldn't have been like an inverted heat haze, the multitude of candles about his office dimming to an odd ashy hue. A musical series of cracks formed in the windowpanes, water beginning to seep through the places where glass rubbed against glass as the brittle material became unsettlingly flexible in nature. Albus got the disconcerting impression that the walls of his office were shivering in place, too subtle to see, but strong enough to make the whimsical knick-knacks on his bookshelves vibrate with a metallic chime.

"I know that you are just as capable of leaving this office as you were breaking in to it," Albus continued, undaunted by Harry's impending loss of control. "I know that magically you are so far above the level of training offered in Hogwarts' curriculum that it's a wonder you even showed up for school this year. I know that physically you have developed far beyond your peers and I know that mentally you have matured in such leaps and bounds ahead most of the school that you struggle to connect with others here – let alone respect them."

One of the arms of his dark magic detectors whirred in place fast enough that its metal joints glowed red-hot, scorching the top of his desk. Severus' wand was out and pointed at Harry, the ex-Death Eater well aware that it would only take a fraction of a second for the young sorcerer to bring the room down around them.

Albus did not drop Harry's furious green stare. "I know that you have been abused and neglected by your family, enough so that it has damaged your ability to trust others. I know that you fight to stay afloat of the anger this has caused. I also know that because of all these things you are almost completely isolated from the world around you."

There was a grinding screech of metal as the dark magic detector began to melt, its arms grinding against each other as the base dissolved underneath it. The stench of burnt carpet filled the office as molten silver dripped off the edge of the desk and puddled on the floor, leaving behind a blackened trail of singed wood.

A sooty film formed over the windowpanes and from the corner of Albus' eye, it looked as if the rainwater was flowing _up_ the glass. The armrests of Remus' chair creaked under his grip, his eyes the colour of polished brass as the wolf surfaced in response to Harry's threat.

"And I know that because of this," said Albus, voice low and compassionate. "You are a **very** _lonely_ young man."

The room went still.

It was as if they'd all seen the bright flare of lightning and were waiting for the roar of thunder behind it.

Though the frantic undercurrent of motion had settled, his office still bore damage to the windows and walls, the candles still burning with a pale dusty flame. Water continued to seep through the cracked windowpanes as rain crawled up its surface. Harry stared at the destruction from under heavy lids and the light reflected in his irises held a strange, almost slick, iridescence, like the slow swirl of sugar-water in a cup of absinthe.

"But I am powerless to help you if you continue sabotaging your place here at Hogwarts," Albus continued. "My hands are tied, Harry. I cannot allow you to keep lashing out at the students and teachers of this school and I cannot shield you from the consequences of your actions."

"Meaning?" said Harry, an eyebrow arched in question.

"You assaulted another student with the intent to permanently maim him at the least, someone who could not protect himself from you and it is very likely that Mr. Bletchley and his family will choose to press charges for his injuries," replied Albus, wondering how far he'd have to go in order for Harry to understand the seriousness of the situation.

Harry's lip curled with derision. "He'd have a hard time proving that he was the victim if he did so," he said, tone flat and unamused. "Not only did he cast the first curse, he also outnumbered me. In a court of law, anything I did in retaliation would be ruled as self-defence."

"That may be so," said Albus, signalling for Severus to put away his wand. "But you will have a hard time convincing those of us gathered here that it was self defence and not something of a more sinister nature."

"I'm being _punished_?" asked Harry, an incredulous note slipping into his voice as if the idea was so foreign that he was having a hard time wrapping his mind around the concept.

Albus' reply was unflinching. "Yes."

Harry slapped a hand down on the heavy wood of Albus' desk and stood, running his hands through his hair as he paced. The end of Severus' wand peeked out of his sleeve and even Remus had made an aborted motion towards his pocket.

"What are my options?" Harry asked finally.

"It depends entirely on you, Harry. Truthfully, I am not even sure if it would be wise for you to continue at Hogwarts."

"What if I left?"

Remus made a startled noise.

Albus tilted his head to better study the tall young man whose presence managed to fill his office without much effort at all. "Do you want to leave?"

"_Yes_." The word emerged as more of a hiss than any sound made by a human throat, half-garbled like Harry wasn't aware it'd been waiting to escape.

Albus felt distraught at how emphatically Harry wished to be away from the one place he _knew_ the boy had once regarded as a sanctuary. What had happened to change him so much? In hindsight, his behaviour almost made sense; Harry probably felt confined by the repetition of breakfast-classes he was too advanced for-lunch- more classes-dinner-sleep-wake up-do it all over again. For someone used to living independently with the freedom to do as he wished, such a routine would become monotonous and stifling.

Harry was exhibiting destructive behaviour not just because he felt threatened, but also because the boy was crawling out of his skin with boredom.

"And into who's care would I be consigning you?" asked Albus, putting away his lingering sense of distress at Harry's answer. He'd asked for the truth. He'd gotten it in spades. "I cannot condone giving you back into the care of a dark wizard. Especially not when this – " Albus gestured to the room around them. "...is what comes of it. Which is also why I will not allow you to return to your Aunt's home. I can't expel you either because as a minor, you would be remanded into the legal care of your closest magical relations."

A muscle jumped in Harry's jaw, but he nodded in agreement. "Which on my father's side of the family would be through my grandfather's marriage to Dorea Black, and since Sirius is not an option, I'd be given to the Malfoy's." Harry let out a soft huff of mocking laughter. "You'd be better off tying a bow around my neck and hand-delivering me to Voldemort himself."

Albus' brows climbed his forehead. "Indeed. I also cannot let you off with a slap on the wrist and the loss of points as I'm certain neither would be an effect deterrent towards further misconduct."

"So, the truth is, I have no real options," said Harry, his voice gone a flat, monotonic drone of sound. The young sorcerer's expression settled into chill, remote lines, like he was so removed from the situation at hand that there was all the personality of a stone shard behind those features.

"Not quite," replied Albus, summoning the tea set sitting on a low table beside his bookshelves. Tapping the teapot with his wand, steam began to rise out of the spout as the porcelain warmed under his hands. Severus waved off Albus' offer as Harry sank down into his seat, the sorcerer's restless energy replaced with suspicion.

"Two sugars," murmured Remus, wrapping a scarred hand around the delicate china.

Albus gestured to the cup before Harry with the teapot. The young man shook his head, choosing instead to tap his saucer twice, a violet light flaring over the bone china before the strong aroma of coffee mixed with the ozone tang of Harry's magic filled the air.

Conjuration. Using dark magic. Was Harry even capable of non-tainted spells any more? Just how _far_ had he delved into the dark arts? Harry bled off dark energy in such great amounts that Albus wondered if he was even aware of what he was doing.

Simply put, the young sorcerer had to attain a better level of control over himself and though disturbed as Albus was by Harry's willingness to kill, Hogwarts was the only place safe enough for Harry to learn such discipline. There were rooms that had not been used for centuries, places with enough wards to ensure that Harry could cut loose without harming the other students. Under Albus' watchful eye, the sorcerer could relearn his boundaries. And hopefully, Harry could do this without hurting himself either.

Albus was no fool, however much he may have played the dotty old jester on occasion. Chain him down and Harry would flee. Provoke him and Harry would attack. Any further probing would be met with extreme hostility and Harry would be delighted to lead them around and around in as many circles as it took to exhaust the subject.

But what could he offer that Harry would take seriously?

"Harry," Albus intoned, catching the young sorcerer's attention.

Green eyes flicked up to meet his own as Harry drank from his cup.

Albus did not like how quickly Harry cycled through his emotional spectrum back to nonchalance. "What can I do in this situation to restrain you? I acknowledge that it is not possible to do so without your consent." Spreading his hands, Albus continued, "You've put me in a real quandary. My first loyalty is to the students of this school and while you are still a student, you are also only one of many. And you are out of control. You are a loose cannon on my campus."

A part of Albus wondered if the young sorcerer should be allowed to live, if he would be better off removing Harry as a threat before he became a new Dark Lord. It was obvious that between Hadrian Sharr and Mab –

No.

Harry was not that far gone and Albus refused to even entertain the notion. The young man before him could still feel compassion towards those weaker than himself and that was something Tom Riddle had _never_ been capable of.

"Which is why I have decided to remove you from Gryffindor House."

Remus sucked in a startled breath of air and promptly choked on his tea.

"You can't be serious," Severus stated flatly, disbelief taking over his neutral expression. "Where will you put him?"

Harry's face went eerily blank.

Albus pulled out a sheet of parchment crawling with tiny runic sequences. It shivered in his hands as he placed it in front of Harry alongside a short white quill taken from a dove's wing.

"You may stay at Hogwarts, but only if you swear an oath not to harm the students within these walls. Outside of this school, many of your peers will end up on opposing sides and I cannot keep you from choosing your own. But on these grounds, you will not raise a hand against them. Do you consent to this?"


	21. Bad Moon Rising

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**A/N:** Thanks goes to Palindrome, Tenages, VotN, Garden, T3t and Hashasheen for their insight and commentary.

Andro, you're a fucking lifesaver for talking me through my stumbling points at the beginning of this chapter - I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for your careful analysis of Circular Reasoning and my work in general. Your brain is the Hope Diamond of minds.

A special thank you also goes to 13thadaption, who was there every step of the way. Cheers, your assistance is worth its weight in gold. _Especially_ considering how long it took to get this chapter off the ground.

The descriptions of Death, and the bells were referenced from Garth Nix's _Sabriel_, which you should already know from my notes in the prologue. i.e. See above disclaimer.

Chapter Twenty

Bad Moon Rising

_Violence as a solution is woven through human nature like a damning red thread. _

_**-Stephen King**_

The door swung shut behind Harry's fleeing figure.

It was the second time in so many hours that Remus watched Harry sow untold amounts of chaos and disappear with little more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement to the mess he'd created.

"You're letting him go?" Severus murmured, his voice hitting low notes on the dangerous side of angry.

The lines around Dumbledore's sharp blue eyes deepened with strain. "What would you have me do?" Despite the man's seemingly impenetrable calm, Remus could sense the faint tremble of exhaustion running through Dumbledore's arms, the subtle shush of fabric brushing against itself.

"I can tell him that what he has done is wrong," Dumbledore continued, meeting Severus' eyes and then Remus' own, his voice never changing from the soft compelling tone that was almost resonant in the hush of the office. "I can even give him help if he so chooses to accept it. But in the end, only Harry can decide that it is morally reprehensible to act in such a manner and that he cannot continue like this."

Severus made a sharp, one-handed gesture to the wreckage of Dumbledore's office around them. "It is not a matter of doing the _right thing_, Headmaster," he bit out. "You've laid out his dire lack of preferable alternatives, handed him an ultimatum with little room for error and have, in essence, pinned him into a corner like a rat. _What _do you _think _he will do?"

_'He's going to run_.' The words zipped across Remus' thoughts, leaving him light-headed in their wake.

"My own options are just as limited, Severus," replied the headmaster, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding Severus' question.

Dumbledore unfolded his hands, fingers splayed outwards like the wings of a bird. "Could I chain Harry to obedience?"

The answer wanted to leap off Remus' tongue.

_Of course you could._

But...what good would it do?

Remus cast a sidelong look at the Potions Master.

There was a measure of resignation in Severus' expression, lips pinched white and bloodless around stifled words of anger and disappointment.

The truth of the matter was that it was never about capability or even willingness. Morality was a far heavier weight to carry and required a great deal more patience and care.

"No," Remus said aloud in response to the headmaster's question.

"Precisely that. Yes, I could enforce my will over his own," the headmaster declared with unflinching honesty. "But by doing so, I would accomplish little more than teaching Harry that there is yet another person in his life who seeks to manipulate him and subvert his free will for their own agenda."

Rain pattered against the windowpanes, the water flowing molasses-slow in sluggish circles over the glass as if it couldn't decide whose call to follow: gravity or the siren's song of dark magic. Severus stood stiff and unyielding over the chair where Harry had sat. With his arms crossed and shoulders hunched, the dark folds of Severus' robes hung heavy and austere, making the man into yet another flat shadow in the strange ashy lighting of the office.

"And with him bound in such a manner," postulated Dumbledore, the thoughtful hum of his voice lulling against the sound of the rain on the sill. "Could I delude myself into believing that Harry has changed? That he will now do the right thing of his own accord?"

Dumbledore shook his head and replied to his own question, "I cannot in good conscience _bind_ Harry in what would amount to illegal slavery. This contract must go both ways."

"You're offering him an apprenticeship," said Remus, the words almost startled out of him.

Severus looked away, shoulders lowering from their defensive position. "He will disappoint you, Albus." He gave one last cold-eyed stare to Dumbledore's seated form and straightened, a hand griping the back of Harry's chair. "I cannot passively sit by while you indulge in such _wilful_ blindness," he said flatly.

Severus vanished out the office door much the same as Harry.

Remus' skin prickled with unease as he clutched at the armrests of the chair. He was out of his depth and sinking fast and worse yet, he couldn't see the situation getting any better.

Ghostly light glinted off of Dumbledore's hair as he bent his head over his hands.

There was a staccato rattle against the windowpane, the sound breaking the weighted hush of the office. An owl rapped its beak once more on the glass, its brown and gold-speckled feathers dishevelled and dripping with water. It took Dumbledore four tries to open the warped frame of the window. And when the headmaster brought the bird inside, Remus saw shards of ice flake off the barn owl's pinions and melt against the sill.

He wondered if the owl had flown through the storm of Harry's anger.

Perhaps it had.

Remus caught sight of the wax seal on the heavy parchment, recognizing the rearing griffon of the Bletchley coat of arms.

_'I cannot passively sit by while you indulge in such wilful blindness.'_

The words Severus said rankled within him and Remus followed his path out the door just as the Headmaster deposited the windswept bird onto Fawkes' empty perch.

Around and around spun the headmaster's staircase until it spat him back out in the corridor.

"Severus!" said Remus, raising his voice before the dour man could disappear in a swirl of dark robes around the corner. The stone gargoyle ground to a close behind him as the empty hall caught his words, bouncing the last syllable of the Potions Master's name back at Remus in a short, clipped echo.

Severus' tall form stilled, his head cocked to the side as to listen to Remus without having to look at him. "Lupin," he intoned, his words rent through with dry, mocking sarcasm. "I don't suppose it's within your ability to grasp how_ superfluous_ your assistance is to me."

"You're just _looking _for a convenient target to take your anger out on," Remus growled, unable to keep the caustic scorn out of his voice.

The thin corners of Severus' mouth turned upwards. "Is that what you think this is? Unlike you, Lupin, I've never had the luxury of shirking _my_ responsibilities," he murmured, echoing Harry's earlier remarks.

"What are you going to do with Harry?" said Remus, ignoring the Potions Master's pointed barb.

"Whatever it takes," Snape replied flatly. His lips curled back into a alligator's yellow sneer."Some of this mess could have been avoided if we had taken prompt action instead of dithering about the brat's fragile state of mind."

"Prompt action?" said Remus, appalled at Severus' brutal statement. "I wonder, Severus, if you've ever heard of a man called Hitler."

Severus smiled a thin, mean sort of grin, amusement glittering in his black eyes. "I wonder, Lupin, if you've ever heard of a man called Dr. Kevorkian."

"What?"

"He intends to cull the herd, Lupin. Or did it escape your notice how quickly the brat has begun to pick off the sick and the slow?" said Severus over his shoulder as he turned away.

"_You cold-hearted prick_," Remus snarled at Severus' back. "You have got to be mad. How else could you justify starting a vendetta against a boy who hasn't personally done anything to you? You've been looking for an excuse to go after Harry all this time and now that you have it, you're going to do your damnedest to destroy his life."

_That_ got his attention.

Severus whirled around, white lines of anger carved into the sides of his mouth. "No matter how badly you wish to make me the villain of the piece, there are certain truths that you would be a fool to deny," the Potions Master hissed. "Potter has undergone great changes since last school year, the most disturbing of which are not even readily apparent. _Think_, Lupin, _think_."

Remus crossed his arms in an attempt to keep from wrapping his hands around the skinny column of Snape's throat.

"Not ten minutes ago," murmured Severus, eyes fervent and staring into Remus' own. "Potter nearly brought down the walls of the Headmaster's office in response to a simple assessment of his mindset. You _cannot_ tell me that is the rational reaction of somebody in their right mind. And despite your pigheaded refusal to acknowledge it, I know you saw the results of his little _breakdown – _" The man almost spat the word. "– on the train. No sane individual would do something as stupid as to run _towards_ a threat that is actively preying on them."

Remus fixed a flat stare on the Potions Master, the roots of his teeth beginning to ache from being ground together. "What are you getting at?"

The alligator's smile was back. "Would you like to place a wager?"

The wolf paced restless and hungry in the back of Remus' mind. _'Damn you, Severus.'_

Severus' expression turned smooth and smug. "Should he be questioned under Veratiserum, how likely would it be that his reaction to the dementors was merely a performance for our benefit?"

Remus rubbed a weary hand over his face. "I am… struggling to follow your craziness," he replied. "How exactly –" _what came unglued in that twisted mind of yours for you to believe the absolute shite dribbling out of your mouth?_ "Why would his terror be anything close to play-acting? How could that kind of fear be feigned?"

"It is a logical response," Severus purred, crossing his arms and drawing his robes around him. "One well formulated to provoke the most sympathetic emotions toward him as possible. A clever bit of misdirection, wasn't it? And while we are all so worried about Potter's delicate emotional balance, nobody questions his use of dark magic – or how a thirteen-year-old boy was able to do something that even fully trained Aurors cannot achieve.

"He's manipulated you." Severus straightened, head held high and his eyes glittering with triumph. "And you're too busy looking for James Potter to see the monster underneath. It says a certain something about blindness towards your own condition, doesn't it?"

"You know what Severus?" Remus looked up, the wolf's snarl echoing in his voice. "In the end, you've still lost."

The Potions Master's lips thinned with annoyance. "What are you on about?"

It was Remus' turn to smile; wide and sharp, it was the wolf's grin, teeth ready to rip into the soft flesh of his prey's belly. _Little pig, little pig, won't you let me in by the hair of your chinny-chin-chin?_ "James Potter is twelve years dead and rotting in the ground. And yet here you are - "

Remus leaned forward and watched as Snape took an involuntary step back.

"All these years later," the wolf continued, fingers beginning to grow claws the colour of old bone – the same colour as Severus' steadily paling face. "And you're still feuding with him. You're fighting with a dead man, Severus. As far as I'm concerned? He _won_. That's _his_ wife he's buried next to, the same wife he _died_ defending, the _mother_ of his _son_ whom you hate enough to condemn as a lunatic addicted to dark magic because he represents everything that slipped through your fingers before he was even a gleam in his father's eye.

"If there was any sort of competition between you and James," Remus said lowly, fury subsiding into exhaustion. "You lost it long ago. Do us all a favour and _move on_."

Severus' nostrils flared with anger, red spots of indignation sitting high on his cheeks. "You think James Potter won something?" he hissed. "His progeny is drowning in dark magic, his wife – his _prized_ possession – is dead, and come to think of it, he's come down with a bad case of dead himself. If anything, that bastard lost worse than I have. If the dead are capable at all of judgement, I bet he's regretting that _thing_ that calls himself his son most of all."

* * *

The storm of Potter's fury had grown into a deluge, the ozone tang of dark magic lingering in the air about the grounds.

Severus crossed his arms and leaned against the iron brace of the enormous clock window, twin to the one overlooking Hogwarts' Entry Hall. He had finally found the boy after the absurd _tête-à-tête_ with Lupin and an hour's search of the surrounding grounds and secret passages. And of course Potter would have sequestered himself into one of the many obscure areas of the castle that were as difficult to access as they were to find.

The wooden slats of the covered footbridge were slick with mildew and damp from the rain blowing in under the eaves. Beneath it, the small ravine dividing the castle and the old carriage house was beginning to fill with water, a gurgling brook growing out of the overflow from the lake. Severus watched Potter the Younger pace back and forth across the rain-wet boards, the boy already taller and broader than his father ever had been at this age.

Dumbledore was a fool if he thought Harry Potter needed magic to harm another student.

Potter's fellow students were already suffering from collateral damage alone. Two of Bletchley's cohorts had ended up with enough minor injuries from spell backlash between them to keep Poppy busy for hours. Not to mention the harm done to Potter's own yearmate – upon snipping the threads holding the Gryffindor third-year's mouth closed, Poppy discovered that his tongue was sewn to the roof of his mouth as well.

Dumbledore was also delusional if he thought that Potter would capitulate to the Headmaster's contract without an unacceptable degree of leeway. The boy was far more canny than he alluded to and was turning into a regular con artist. Severus was coming to understand that playing mind games with Potter was less of an exercise in manipulation and more of an effort in wagering how much could be sacrificed without totally losing the bet.

The rain outside deepened in intensity and Potter's trainers slid across a wet patch on the footbridge as he spun around to stalk back in the other direction. Somewhere, Severus noticed, Potter had picked up a nervous tic of running the knuckles of his hand over the curve of his lower lip.

"I need for you to keep an eye on Harry," Albus had asked before the mess of earlier that afternoon. "You have the objectivity I find myself lacking in this situation, and you will recognize the signs far easier than I."

Severus had until ten o'clock that night to make a decision.

_'How kind of you, Headmaster, to actually offer me a _choice_ in this matter.'_

The north face of Severus' office looked like something out of a surrealist's painting. Over a hundred galleons worth of potion's ingredients had been hurled at that wall, the end result warping the stone, the shelves and the floor underneath into something that looked a lot like dripping clocks and melted cheese.

He let out a mirthless chuckle, folding the heavy black canvas of his work robes tighter about his thin frame.

As if Severus was some kind of patron saint for the lost, misguided little souls of budding dark wizards. As if Severus could stand against the stubborn might of a teenage wizard who believed that he, and he alone, was right and righteous. As if Severus was some kind of bulwark against self-inflicted stupidity.

As if he could reverse the spell of influence a powerful sorcerer of the Old World held over a needy young Gryffindor.

"Who was it that came out of the boggart's closet, Potter? Some nightmare interpretation of the Dark Lord?" Severus muttered to the rain-blurred image of Potter pacing over the ravine, the reflection of his own visage appearing like a dark-eyed ghost on the windowpane. "Or was it Hadrian Sharr?"

How many of his students had fought this battle and lost? How many times had he worked at showing his Slytherins that there were more options available than merely the paths they were bound to by family association? How many times had communication trailed off after the student in question returned to their parents' control for the summer? And after tasting the corrupting influence of dark magic... After feeling that black, intoxicating rush in their veins... How many times had that same student returned to Hogwarts holding little resemblance to the teen whom he'd last spoken to not three months before?

Just one more Slytherin. Just one more son or daughter of a dark legacy.

Just one more child who'd slipped through his fingers because of people like Archer Bletchley, Lucius Malfoy... and Hadrian Sharr.

Now to see this same destructive behaviour mirrored in the son of James Potter.

Now to see his _own_ behaviour mirrored in the son of James Potter.

In _Lily's_ son.

Severus laughed.

A hoarse, hacking echo ricocheted off of the silent landscape portraits and crumbling statues of the dusty corridor. His fingers itched to seize upon the antique statuary and further pulverize it against the immutable stone of Hogwarts' walls.

His own behaviour mirrored in the son of Lily _Sharr_.

_'You fool,'_ Severus thought to himself. _'How badly you have floundered this time.'_

And he'd like to blame it on the fact that he didn't know Lily was a blueblood – didn't know that what he was giving up wasn't a mudblood Gryffindor with an opposing moral philosophy or some mere childhood friendship, but a person who held more power to their name than the Dark Lord would ever gain. Because when it came down to it, Severus joined the Death Eaters of his own accord, craving that greedy, elusive power he'd struggled for all his life. Was that Potter's motivation for joining Sharr?

Had he too, succumbed?

Albus Dumbledore wanted to believe that Potter's problem was a matter of influence.

On the footbridge, Potter reached out, his fingers just brushing the door back to the castle before his face twisted in a grimace. Robes flaring out behind him like rain-sodden raven's wings, the boy spun around to pace back towards the carriage house. Severus only caught a bare sliver of Potter's expression, but a chill settled over his skin at the savage snarl that looked more at place on a rabid animal than on a teenage boy.

A mere matter of _influence_?

What a farcical load of bullshit.

One Faerie Queen with a malicious agenda did not a dark wizard make. Neither did whatever "teachings" Hadrian Sharr had inflicted upon the boy.

Further discrediting Albus' theory, the manner in which Potter assaulted Bletchley was something only gained through self-discipline, experience, and massive amounts of control over one's own mind.

Potter had _deliberately_ chosen to attack Bletchley.

The boy may have had some powerful players tugging at his strings, but that didn't change the fact that he had made his own choices – his own bad decisions – from the options offered to him.

Severus sneered, upper lip curled and teeth grinding together. He knew this insidious dance, just the same as he knew all of its precarious steps, one right after the other.

When Severus Snape was nine years old, he stumbled across an old 1950s back issue of _Esquire_ in the local Muggle public library. It didn't matter that it was foreign, or that it was an adult magazine – full of skin in old-fashioned lingerie and other fruit too ripe for his young eyes – or that it was clearly Not Supposed To Be There. His father would have tanned his hide if he had found little Severus reading dirty magazines, but that didn't matter because his father would tan his hide anyway and from that perspective, Severus had very little to lose.

It was curiosity that made him look at it, flipping through pages of flesh that wouldn't hold his interest for another few years yet. But the stories... the stories held him enthralled.

Over twenty years later and the words held the same gut-punch awe as they did the day he'd devoured them. Sense-memory left the smell of crushed grass and wildflowers from where he had lain, sprawled across the ground under the old beech tree in the park, with the word's of Bradbury's stitched tattoo-witch wheezing into his ears: _'I know the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future,' she whispered, eyes knotted into blindness, face lifted to this unseen man. 'It is on my flesh. I will paint it on yours, too.'_

It wasn't inked into the boy's skin –

_'Not yet,'_ Severus' traitorous mind murmured, the memory of burnt flesh and the night-black lines of the Dark Mark rising just as strong as that sunny day in the park, that moment of yesteryear.

It wasn't inked into the boy's flesh, no, but the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future was etched as deeply into Harry Potter's actions as it was in Severus' own history, a mirror image made out of harsh reality and bitter irony.

The rainwater sloshing through the rocky crevasses of the ravine built into a thundering torrent; the storm sparked by Potter's turbulent dark magic becoming a howling beast of magic-fuelled might.

"You should have been one of mine," Severus told Lily's son as the figure pacing the bridge took shelter in the alcove in front of the carriage house. "Slytherin would have stripped the stupid from you long before the end of your first year."

* * *

Water cascaded down the eaves and splattered the handrail, visibility diminishing under the roar of water falling from the sky. In the cool bluing of dusk, it felt like Harry was swimming underwater, the candlelit windows of the Main Hall becoming orange sparks in the distance.

Fuck, it was almost as if the headmaster was daring him to run.

_'Do I want to run?'_ Harry thought. The fear and panic still jangling about his nerves screamed _YES_, but the slow reawakening of common sense told him to carefully consider his options.

How much longer could he justify hiding behind Dumbledore's skirts like the child he no longer was? And what would happen if he left? How much trouble, and what manner thereof, would he stir up by disappearing from Hogwarts? With the confirmation that Wormtail was no longer in England, Harry had little tying him to the castle save for nostalgia and boyhood friendships. Obligation and debt said that he had better places to be.

But to bail out on Dumbledore... Could he live with himself after disappointing the old man yet again? After how many second chances his old mentor had tried to give him?

Just how many resources would the headmaster waste trying to find him if he disappeared? Dumbledore would not be able to live with himself for what he perceived as failure to help Harry, not when he cared so fervently about his students and especially not when it was Harry himself in peril. Harry was neither dumb nor oblivious; somewhere along the line, he'd become the closest the old man had ever come to having a grandson and it was as evident now as it was when he was twenty years old.

From the limited point of view the headmaster was working with, Harry could almost understand his worry.

Three months ago, he'd left Hogwarts a troubled boy who'd just survived the sort of shitstorm most twelve-year-olds never encountered. And then he'd returned so completely different that Dumbledore was well within his rights to suspect Polyjuice, kidnapping, or any other manner of foul play. Harry was surprised that the headmaster's canny intellect hadn't drawn a much different conclusion in the end: Him being trained by a mysterious relative, even one who held a very _dark_ agenda in mind, seemed almost too easy, too _obvious_.

_'Shame on you, Albus Dumbledore,'_ Harry thought to himself as he dodged a stream of water trickling from a hole in the eaves. _'Shame on you for falling victim to Occam's Razor.'_

In a way, Harry almost wanted Dumbledore to figure it out, to be able to share the burden of knowledge with the headmaster, someone far better equipped to deal with what was to come. But he couldn't shake the notion that telling him would be ill-advised. If the headmaster was horrified by him removing Bletchley's psychosis, what else then, what other actions of Harry's would he condemn?

The entrance to the castle loomed before him in the growing gloom. Spinning on the ball of his foot, Harry paced back towards the carriage house, damp robes flapping about his ankles.

"_I am offering you a safe haven, Harry," said Dumbledore, spreading his hands palm up over the top of the desk like a benevolent deity as he beseeched him to stay._

The contract...

Harry shook his head, bitter mirth twisting his mouth into a strained smile.

The contract was far too stifling. Which was yet another black mark against staying. The headmaster could not possibly believe that Harry would consent to such folly. If there was a threat to his person, Harry would take steps to remove it and he was under no such delusion that he was somehow _safe_ at Hogwarts.

Harry paused mid-way across the bridge.

_'Is this a test?' _

If so, then to whom did the test belong to? Mab? Dumbledore? Some other yet unknown player?

'_What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?'_ murmured the mantra inside his head as he resumed his walk across the footbridge. It wasn't like someone had handed him a map of what to do or where to go as soon as he'd woken up in his childhood home. The path set before him was as rocky as a mountain range and the only thing shittier than his current options were the decisions that had led him there.

The stinging spray of water blowing in under the eaves hit his face in an ice-cold rush and Harry took shelter in the protected alcove of the carriage house.

Was this the point where everything fell apart? Where all of the lies he'd been juggling came tumbling down? At what point could he stop lying to cover up all of his previous lies? And at what point had it become so bad that Harry almost _believed_ Hadrian Sharr to be a separate person from himself?

In truth, Harry was Harry, no matter what 'face' he wore. In truth, _he_ was what Dumbledore dreaded, the one who had led 'Harry' astray, the one that Sirius feared. He knew Dumbledore and he knew his godfather. Dumbledore wasn't hiding his concern for Harry nor did the headmaster bother to mask his worry over the damage done to 'Young Harry Potter' by Hadrian Sharr. And Sirius, no matter how hard he tried to cover it up, wanted nothing to do with the dark wizard his godson had become. Somewhere, somehow, Dumbledore had learned about what he'd done over the summer. Worse yet, Sirius had been there, had _witnessed_ one of the more violent parts of it.

In truth, it was Harry Potter that they despised, his fractured personalities, heritage, dark magic and all.

Sometimes...

Sometimes there were no obvious answers, no logical fix-its. In a choice between what was right and what was easy, sometimes nothing was right and nothing was easy.

"What am I doing?" he murmured, the words lost amidst the sound of the rain, his long-familiar baritone rumble becoming something he felt in the bones of his chest, more so than he could hear with his ears. "What am I _doing_?"

There were no answers, his mind numb and blank as he watched frothy white water rush through the ravine beneath his feet.

He held a hand out from the eaves. Chill rainwater splashed across his palm causing his skin to prickle with goosebumps. Shivering, Harry wiped his hand on his jeans, drawing his hood and tucking the thin folds of his Gryffindor robes tighter around himself.

It was already late and he didn't have much time to spare. He'd already started this day over once, the skin-warm metal of the time-turner resting against his chest.

Harry stopped before the entrance to the carriage house.

This was not an area of the castle that saw a lot of human traffic. Or house-elves for that matter. A much newer carriage house had been built closer to the Gamekeeper's cottage where it was easier to access – where it wasn't on the far side of the castle and tucked into a pocket of the Forbidden Forest. The old stone building of the original carriage house had fallen into disuse and the walkway was warded off for the safety of the student population.

Rusted hinges squealed in protest as Harry tugged on the great black ring of the handle, muscles straining to budge the iron-banded oak. The wooden planks of the door were rotted at the bottom and swollen with moisture, warping snug against the crooked frame of the stone doorway. A gust of stale air wafted across his face as the door gave up a reluctant inch of gap between frame and barrier. Harry waited a moment in case there was something in the carriage house that might have wandered in from the forest behind it.

Nothing.

Reaching out to the deluge beyond the rails, Harry allowed water to pool in his cupped palm. The hinges weren't hexed shut, merely frozen with age. He muttered an old hedge-witch charm as he dripped the rainwater over the gnarled metal hinges, patchy streaks of rust running down the stone.

The next time he tugged on the ring, the hinges gave way with ease, impact shuddering down the handrails of the bridge where the door slammed against them.

A child's giggle drifted out of the carriage house, the sound almost lost amongst the loud gurgle of water running through the ravine.

"Elly!" Harry called out, stepping inside. "Elly, are you there?"

It was dark inside the carriage house, low windows smudged and dirty with dust, half-covered by the overgrown ivy crawling out of the Forbidden Forest. Harry rubbed away a small circle of grime from the windowpane and watched the tiny, sharp-toothed mouths hidden under the too-green leaves work like suckerfish against the outside of the glass as it warmed with the heat from his skin. Trainers leaving clear prints in the grit on the floor, Harry turned away from the window and faced the little ghost perched on a rusting iron carriage wheel.

Her outline was so faint that Harry could see a dusting of cobwebs through the child's bare, filmy arms. Six-year-old Elly Boll wrinkled her little snub nose as she grinned at him from under a short mop of curls, pale eyes glittering with mischief.

Harry wasn't fooled by her appearance. He'd seen her jaw yawn wide into a howl, tiny hands becoming skeletal claws, nails long and hooked like a cat's. Given half a chance, she'd tear him apart – same as all of the unlucky rodents who'd wandered in over the years, small, clean-picked bones piled up in the corners of the carriage house. Elly was more of a malevolent geist than the ghost of an unlucky little girl. Sometimes, just like animals, ghosts went feral.

"Hello Elly," Harry murmured crouching down before her. "My name's Harry."

The ghost's smile turned shy, head turning to the side to show the dimples in the round curve of her cheek. "Hi," she replied, voice high and whisper-soft. Her hands fiddled with the iron spokes of the wheel, nervous energy running through Elly's tiny frame. "Did ya come to see me?"

Harry nodded. "I did." He met her small smile with one of his own, trying not to scare her off. Elly's tendency towards violence usually came out of her skittish nature and since Harry hadn't had months to lure her out of her shell this time around, he wasn't going to take any chances. "Does anybody else visit you?"

Elly picked at the lace ruffle on her pinafore and shook her head, shoulders slumped, the iron carriage wheel ringing as she kicked it with the heels of her hobnailed boots.

"It must get lonely in here," Harry replied quietly. "Who do you play with, then?"

The pile of animal bones near one of the windows shuddered, wispy shadows curling about under the damp haze of twilight coming through the dusty windowpane. Dirt shifted beneath his feet, putting him off balance as his left foot sank lower than the right. A half-rotted wooden footlocker for storing tack and grooming supplies scraped across the floor from its place near the old horse stalls. It smashed against the far wall hard enough to pop the top off, scattering little white maggots over the floor, pale bodies writhing where their home had been upset by Elly's moodiness.

The matted fur of an unfortunate cat peeked out of the crumpled mess, translucent worms seething out of the hole in its belly, teeth bared in a stiff yowl. Its nose was half-gone and a small bone-coloured worm crawled over the tattered remnants of its ear and disappeared into the hollows of the cat's eye sockets.

There was a frayed red collar around the cat's neck, the tag too rusted to read.

"So you like bones," Harry murmured, his skin going cold enough that he could feel it in his teeth, breath misting in the chill air of the carriage house.

The little ghost tilted her head, curls rustling and sounding more like sandpaper than hair.

A large group of ghosts could cause the air to drop down to wintry temperatures. When he'd visited Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party years ago, Harry remembered that it had been so cold in the chamber that his fingernails had remained blue for almost an hour afterwards.

Elly was strong enough to wreck havoc all by her lonesome when she manifested. There was a very good reason why spectres like Elly Boll were quarantined or banished if they couldn't be controlled. Few knew the real reason why the ghosts of Hogwarts were so amicable: their consciousness was anchored into the wards and bound to their actual bodies preserved in the catacombs below the old chapel that was now used as Professor Sprout's office by the greenhouses. That awareness and constant influx of magic afforded them their 'spark' of humanity.

Elly was different. Before Dumbledore's predecessor introduced the thestrals, the carriages were pulled by actual horses and one night, the caretaker had gotten careless. His daughter paid the price. Part of her remains were ground into the dirt of the carriage house where she'd been trampled to death; the rest of her body was scattered out into the Forbidden Forest where she had been dragged away by the tangled reins, sharp hooves pulverizing Elly's mangled remains into the soft loam of the forest floor.

Elly was dangerous, because only part of her was bound to the carriage house. She could come and go as she pleased.

There were wards in place to keep her contained, but they were old and frayed. And on the anniversary of her death, Elly was quite capable of slipping through the holes and running amok through the Forbidden Forest.

"Would you like to go out and play?" asked Harry, careful to keep his tone light and even.

The two-hundred-year-old ghost bit her lip and ducked her head away. "'M not supposed to go outside," she muttered sullenly, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her pinafore, feet kicking against the carriage wheel hard enough to knock some of the rust off.

Harry smiled, reeling the little ghost in. "What if I gave you permission to?"

Elly's lip curled, showing a mouthful of ragged teeth. "Don't matter." She had enough of an accent that it sounded like _doan matta_ with a heavy, rolling _-arr_ at the end. "Can't go anyway."

"Why not?"

The bones of her face popped as she yawned, licking at the corner of her silver-stained mouth with a long, pointed tongue. "Stuck." Her lips turned down into a sulky pout. "Bored _and_ stuck," she said as if he'd just tried to feed her an entire plate of vegetables.

Harry tilted his head and nodded thoughtfully, affecting a pensive look. "What if I could help?" he said, looking directly at Elly.

A pair of baleful silver eyes stared into his own, something not quite right lighting up the shape of her face. "Why?" she demanded.

"Well, Miss Elly," Harry replied. "I'm looking for an extra pair of eyes and I was hoping you'd help me."

Few things stood out from the murky red haze of his sixth year, but Elly was one of the most memorable. He'd stumbled onto her home one morning, covered in blood and far too late to sneak back into Hogwarts from a late night appointment with the latest Death Eater. After a brief discussion on whether or not he was edible, Harry had passed out on a pile of mouldering straw and slept until it was night again. The shy little spectre had taken a real shine to him after that.

"What do _I_ get out of it?" asked Elly, a pint-sized haggler with the teeth to back up her prices.

Harry's mouth curled up into a smile that was no less sharp than the ghost's own maw full of sawblades and knives. "The opportunity for mischief and mayhem."

Elly spit into her hand, a gloopy glob of viscous silver shining on her palm and held the appendage out for Harry to shake. "Deal?" she said, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head in a rather snide expression, daring him to back out.

Following her lead, Harry spat into his hand and grasped her own. Holding her hand was like gripping an ice cube – a rather slimy one in this case – but Elly's tiny mitt was as solid as his own.

"Deal," he agreed.

Elly smiled, sweet and angelic. Then she was off, spinning around the carriage-house like a whirling dervish, her bell-clear laughter abundant and overflowing.

Looking down at his palm, Harry saw no sign of dampness, neither his own spit or the ghost's.

Despite what Ministry propaganda would have the masses believe, basic necromancy was quick, cheap, and easy and required almost no esoteric ingredients to work.

All you needed was to bleed a little.

Really, saliva or any _other_ body fluid worked just as well; it all depended on _who_ or _what_ was being bound.

But in Elly's case, Harry wasn't merely pressing the little ghost into his service, he was removing her previous bindings and the wards preventing her from leaving the carriage house. It would take more than just spit to let her walk free.

Shucking his wet robes off and draping them over the rusty carriage wheel, Harry knelt in the grit of the floor. From one oversized pocket of his hand-me-down jeans, Harry pulled a tiny waxed canvas pouch of goodies. Chalk, sage, a folded hand-mirror made of smoked, gunmetal-grey glass with worn leather hinges, a pair of white feathers, a gleaming silver reliquary and a bone-handled knife clinked together inside.

Harry dug the first two fingers of his left hand into the dirt and dragged them around himself, stopping just short of closing the circle.

"Elly," Harry murmured, patting the ground before him. "I need you to stand right here."

Wary, but curious, Elly edged through the small opening. Her doleful silver eyes followed Harry as he reached around Elly's cold little form to close the circle. Coarse grit built up under his fingernails as he scratched the marks for breaking bindings and containment wards into the floor, a crooked line of runes scrawled in the dirt. Power rippled through the circle, his magic liming the contours with a faint bruised hue. It was a poor substitute for real cloaking wards, but it would mask the majority of his spellwork.

Harry picked up the bone-handled knife.

Hunger glittered on Elly's eyes, the same muted violet glow of power lighting up the pale edges of her frame.

Blood splattered the dirt at her feet.

The knife was so sharp, it was only after Harry slashed his right palm open that he could feel the sting of the blade. And despite being gauze sheer and diaphanous, Elly was beginning to look _solid_.

The little ghost held her hands out. Slow enough to hear each joint crackle like a sheet of ice over a deep lake in mid-winter, Elly curled her tiny fingers into her palms.

Window glass shattered. Glints of amethyst light sparked where the shards pelted the unseen barrier of Harry's circle. The toothy ivy that had covered the windows lay in twisted green shreds over the sill, tiny mouths drying to a desiccated crisp as the plant died.

Harry smiled.

"Fun, isn't it?" he said, amused by the joyous wonder painted across Elly's face. "It's only temporary though."

Mouth splitting at the seams, Elly snarled at him. Thousands of tiny, needle-like teeth gleamed in the fading light, her breath ice-cold against his face.

Unflinching, Harry felt his smile pull tight against the skin of his face in satisfaction. "How would you like to have this forever?"

"_Yes!_" Elly screamed at him, shrill as a bird's cry. The glass on the floor trilled back in such a high resonance that Harry struggled not to wince.

"But I can't do it all by myself," Harry replied, remaining calm and implacable as she started to blur around the edges, fingers growing into ragged claws as she reached for him. "You have to help me."

Elly paused and cocked her head. "_What?_" she spat, her voice still warped out of proportion.

Harry raised his still bleeding hand and tapped his palm.

The angry cry that came out of her mouth sounded like sheet metal being torn in half. Elly's eyes flashed incandescent bright. Sinking a jaw full of piranha's teeth into her hand, the little ghost tore a chunk of flesh from the heel of her palm. Quicksilver globs of ghost blood ran down her arm as she spat the flesh at Harry.

He caught it before it hit the ground.

If Elly's spit had been cold, then her blood felt like pouring liquid nitrogen over his hand. "_Mother of shitting hell!_" he swore over the sound of Elly's tinkling laughter.

Shaking the pouch's contents out over his lap, Harry fished the reliquary out from the mess, its delicate chain almost slithering out of his grasp.

Shaped like an augury's skull in miniature, the silver reliquary showed an unnatural lack of tarnish considering its age. The minuscule clasp at the base of the skull was hard to flip open with shivering hands, but Harry managed to stuff the bit of Elly's ghost-flesh into the smoked glass vial inside. There was an odd slurping sound as the glass began to bulge out into the eye sockets of the augury's skull. A buzz-saw screech vibrated up his arm as Elly reached out and scratched a talon against the side of the vessel, lightning-bright sparks flaring up as she gouged a line in the side of a powerful necromantic tool.

Harry refused to think of this as a bad omen.

"Pretty," she said, humming an old sing-song ditty under her breath. "Can I go play now?"

"Not yet, Elly," said Harry, shaking his head. "We have to go collect your bones."

_'Or, at least as many as I can find,'_ he amended to himself, Elly's chill blood stinging the inside of his wrist where it had dripped onto the cuff of his shirt.

A thestral wandered in and drank from an ancient water trough bolted to the side of the carriage house, its sleek black hide glistening with rainwater. Harry didn't know if the thestral herd was part of Hogwarts' defences or if they were merely oddities unto their own, but...

It would probably be a good idea to perform the majority of his necromancy off school grounds and away from the wards.

Using the side of his unmarked palm as a shovel, Harry scraped away part of the warding circle.

Elly's edges blurred into wispy pewter light.

And then she streaked away like a comet into the Forbidden Forest.

"Goddamnit, Elly!" Harry shouted after her, stumbling to his feet as pins and needles of sensation rushed back into his legs. Foot catching on a pile of animal bones half-melded to the hard-packed dirt, Harry lurched to the side, bracing himself against the stone frame of the back door. Elly's eerie light sparked in the distance, vanishing further into the encroaching dusk.

The cool silver surface of the reliquary bumped against his wrist, the delicate chain still tangled around his fingers.

Harry glanced down at the tiny augury's skull, the last light of day glinting along the scratch Elly had left on its curved beak.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, you little imp," Harry murmured. "Hide and Seek it is."

He gathered up the rest of his tools, startling when his shoulder brushed against the thestral who was now nosing through the animal bones on the floor at Harry feet. The animal's hooves ground the brittle bones into ivory dust as it picked its way through Elly's haphazard piles.

"Sorry, love," Harry said as he collected a stray hair from the thestral's coarse black mane. "But I need this."

Casting a warming charm over his robes, he darted out into the rain.

About a hundred feet from the carriage house, Harry felt the zip-tingle of Hogwarts' wards brush over his skin as he left the boundaries of the school. The Forbidden Forest proper loomed before him, an ancient behemoth whose crown swallowed the cloudy night.

Water streamed from the branches above, turning the leaf mulch and pebbles of the overgrown path beneath his feet into a slick, slippery mess. The brush grew high around here. On his left, the path rose up into a thick wall of rock streaming with rainwater, tree roots gouging holes into the jagged stone arching far up over Harry's head. Clusters of small, luminescent mushrooms grew in the leaf mulch under the brush, their broad heads gleaming with pale green light by the path.

Signs of human existence still lingered near the path. A stone wall jutted out of the brush, deep green moss crawling up its sides. There was a pull his wrist as the reliquary swung to his right, the link between Elly and her blood acting as a dowsing rod.

Stepping over the low wall, Harry started down the sloping side of the hill. Dead leaves, damp with the rain, shifted underfoot as he half-jogged, half-slid down the hill. The gentle tugging of the reliquary guided him downhill where it ended in a shallow, swift-moving stream.

Though the pull of the alembic lessened the closer he drew to the stream, there was still a faint tug at his wrist going downstream. Not for the first time on this rapid hike through the woods, Harry wished he'd worn his boots with their heavy tread on the bottom as he slipped on the verdant lichen covering the rocks rising out of the stream.

And despite being charmed dry, the hems of his robes were soaked by the time the stream tipped over the edge of a deep basin worn into the rock of the hillside.

But there was Elly, perched on a fallen tree trunk lying across the the cold water of the cauldron.

"Why did you run off?" asked Harry, coming to a halt at the rim of the depression, bits of sticks, soil and leaf mulch showering down into the darkness below.

The ground dropped away at the rim of the basin, its sides as smooth as glass from years of water erosion. In the faint light of the reliquary, the churning water looked black as tar and oil-slick, viscous and roiling as the rain agitated its surface. Water from the stream trickled down the sides of the basin. A healthy crop of wormwood hung down from the broad curve of the old oak like a tattered green curtain over surface of the water.

"I remembered," Elly whispered, her voice almost inaudible over the sound of the rain and the swirling water beneath her.

Finding that the oak was lodged firm, Harry picked his way out to Elly's perch and sat down beside her spectral form.

"Remembered what?" he replied, tucking his rain-speckled glasses into his pocket.

Elly looked down into the deep waters below. "Me."

Harry glanced down. Somewhere in the depths below them lay Elly's bones.

"The stream used to go further than this," she said, nervous fingers shredding the eyelet lace of her shirtsleeves. "It went almost all the way to the sea. When the horses drug me over, the ground fell away and... an..."

Elly stopped, lips clamping tight around the words struggling to come out, tears welling up in her eyes.

"...it became very hard to breathe," she finished in a small voice, folding her trembling hands in her lap.

Harry felt a jolt of horror. Elly had still been alive when she'd been dragged out into the Forbidden Forest, surviving just long enough to drown for her troubles.

"The laces from the horses' reins held me against the far side," she said, pointing at an irregularity in the side of the basin, a dip in the rim he hadn't paid much attention to before.

"Is this all of them?" asked Harry, nodding to the deep cauldron full of cold, dark water.

"No." The little ghost shook her head, silver glow dimming. "I don't know. I... I don't think I want to remember anymore. May I stop now?"

"Yes, Elly, you may. You did very well." Not thinking, Harry ran his hand through Elly's curls, the sensation of frosty cobwebs clinging to his fingers.

Elly sucked in a gasping breath and flinched away, almost dislodging herself from the tree trunk. Wild-eyed, she lifted a taloned hand and snarled.

Cursing his impulsive behaviour, Harry lifted his hands, palm up, the pale blue veins of his wrists exposed and vulnerable. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."

The little ghost made an aborted motion, head twitching away to stare at him from the corner of her eye, shoulders hiked up around her tiny ears.

He'd forgotten how much coaxing it had taken last around to pull her out of her shell. But touch had always been iffy. There were days when she'd craved it. And then there were days when she'd been little more than a skittish animal, baring her teeth if he came too close, human words beyond her grasp after all the years of isolation.

"Elly," Harry continued in that same low murmur. "Elly, do you still want me to free you?"

Talons picking at the skin of her lips, Elly nodded, the thin tissue splitting and oozing a thread of quicksilver down her chin.

"Then I will need your help." Harry met her baleful stare and held it. "Can you do that?"

She curled her lip, but nodded.

"Use your words, Elly," replied Harry, the spell needing verbal consent before he could bind her bones.

"_Yes._"

There was the sound of rushing water in his ears as the magic took hold, darker and deeper than the pool beneath his feet. The bitter flavour of ozone broke over his tongue. Feeling boneless and almost buoyant, skin shivering with adrenaline, Harry jumped.

His feet touched the water without a splash, ripples rolling away from his worn trainers where the spell held him aloft. The reliquary pulled at his wrist, pointing square at the spot where Elly's remains lay beneath the murky water. Between it and Elly's ambient glow, the basin was lit as if in broad daylight.

The words burnt his tongue as he spoke them. Rolling the numb spot against the roof of his mouth, Harry watched as the murk released Elly's bones from captivity. The white gleam under the surface growing stronger as the tiny bones of a child's hand floated into view followed by Elly's petite skull and collarbones. The hand twitched, fingers opening and closing as if grasping for something. High above, Elly stared from her perch, expression rapturous.

Her bones shivered, a ripple of magic flaring out around them. Then, limned in violet light, the hand rose out of the water. Ivory finger-bones grabbed the trailing wormwood tight, crushing the green leaves in its grip. It hauled Elly's skeleton out of the water, the other hand dragging in the water behind it, too crushed to be useful. Elly exhaled, mouth falling open in astonishment. The blank curve of the skull's eye sockets stared back as a leg assembled itself underwater, a diminutive foot rising out of the water for a support on the wormwood.

Harry watched as Elly's half-finished remains made their sinuous way up to the little ghost, the chain-length ivory of her spinal column gleaming in the light of the reliquary. Clicking its teeth together as if it were laughing, the skeleton crawled up to the little girl and reached out its good hand.

Wide-eyed, Elly skittered back on her hands and knees.

"Go on," Harry murmured, looking up at the tableau through heavy lids. "It's only animated, it won't bite."

Summoning charms might not work, but damned if animating the bones to follow his command didn't do the trick. Add in a daub of necromancy and Elly's remains obeyed his every whim. Humanity left more of themselves behind than they could guess.

Gritting her teeth, Elly reached out and grabbed the skeleton's proffered limb like she was going to shake its hand.

The left side of Elly's skeleton had been put through the wringer. Most of her ribs were missing on that side as well as one of the major bones in her forearms. Her left femur ended in a jagged stump a few inches away from where the rounded cap of the bone joined with her pelvis.

Harry frowned. Reaching down, he stirred the icy water of the basin with his fingers. No more bones rose out of the depths at his call. And when he lifted his hand from the pool, there was the curious sensation that his fingers were still submerged in chill liquid.

"What are you doing?" asked Elly from above him, the wormwood rustling as she shifted to peer over the edge of the tree trunk.

Harry shook the tingling from his fingers to no avail. "I'm missing the rest," he replied. The wound across his palm broke open again and began to seep blood through his fingers. He cursed under his breath, pressing the hem of his shirt against the cut.

Elly made a pinched-lipped moue. "Well, yes," she said in rebuttal, not a little snide.

"Don't be a brat, Elly," Harry warned, spelling a series of temporary handholds into the smooth side of the basin.

The climb up was a bit more precarious than he liked, buzz-numb fingers refusing to grip with their usual strength.

"What's a brat?" asked Elly when his head lifted out of the hole in the ground.

Harry grunted in reply as he reached for a firmer handhold to haul the rest of his bulk free. A tiny silver hand closed around his wrist and yanked him away from the rim, leaf mulch piling up wet and uncomfortable against his front.

"What's a brat?" Elly repeated, her eyes narrowed and suspicious. Elly's skeleton tipped its head in curiosity and clicked its teeth, already moving under the little ghost's own control instead of Harry's.

He bit back a laugh as he climbed to his feet, the knees of his jeans sodden with mud. "Definitely not you."

The smirky little expression crossing the child-spirit's mouth didn't help his feeling of surreality as Elly linked hands with her own bones and began to climb away from the basin. And despite her skeleton's shambling, one-legged gait, they made good time up the steep line of the hillside.

He scrambled up the side of the hill before he lost Elly again.

The ghost's glow lit up a series of stepping stones worn flat in the wake of the swift-running brook. The Dead weren't all that fond of moving water, but Elly's new lease on 'life' must have emboldened her curious side.

Weaving the single strand of thestral hair into a tiny circle as he walked over to her, Harry rubbed it in the drying trails of silver haemoglobin on the side of the reliquary. "What did you find?" he asked Elly.

"A frog. But she ate it," said Elly, voice taking on a mournful tinge as she pointed at her skeleton.

Sure enough, there was a bumpy, mud-coloured toad with a mangled toe peering through the slats of the skeleton's ribs. Elly's bones clicked its teeth in dismay, poking at the source of the croaking.

"I see," Harry intoned as he reached up inside of the skeleton's rib-cage with his free hand and plucked the unhappy toad from its perch.

"Froggy!" Elly crowed with a gleeful smile, snatching the toad from Harry's hand. Twisting the toad's bent limb completely off, she threw it at her skeleton, crying, "You stole my frog!"

The still twitching leg bounced off of the skeleton's left eye-socket and fell to the ground. Elly's bones patted at its skull, then at its leg before finding the toad's missing limb, putting it into its mouth and biting down.

Click, click, crunch, crunch. Mmm, yum. Toad leg.

The little brown limb kicked at the air from where it was caught in the gaps of the skeleton's teeth, nerve endings still firing off frantic signals to run.

"Blergh," Elly stated flatly, sticking her tongue out.

"Well," Harry muttered over her head as he trapped one of the skeleton's hands against his knee and forced the thestral hair ring down over its wrist. "At least I don't have to teach _you_ not to put your toys in your mouth."

He felt odd not using his wand, despite the fact that most necromantic spells never called for one. It was an unsettling sensation to keep reaching for the old holly wand, which felt like a mere wooden rod compared to the resonant strength of his yew wand. His fingers brushed against the holly wand again and Harry shivered, skin growing cold as the warming charms on his robes faded. Murmuring the incantation, Harry watched the thestral hair ring begin to emit a faint luminescence.

It was like he'd stuffed his ears with cotton; the sound of the rain-swollen brook drowning out the storm overhead.

Elly's skeleton picked at the fragile bracelet, tiny finger-bones tugging at the strands. Almost too quick to see, a tremor went through the bones, prompting it to clamber to its knees with short, jerking movements like a puppet on a string, quite unlike its human mannerisms of before. Head swivelling sideways to stare at a rockfall near the bend of the stream, Elly's skeleton lurched away from the stepping stones.

Harry raised a hand when Elly stepped forward to follow. "Not yet."

"What did you do to her?" she asked, hands still wrapped around her hapless prisoner. Elly's voice was barely audible over the rushing water; Harry only able to pick out what she was saying by the shapes her mouth made around the words.

"Just watch," Harry said in her ear, his own voice lost to the sounds of the waterway as well.

Stumbling over the rocky ground on its hands and single good leg, the skeleton stretched an arm out as if it were grasping for something just out of sight. The mud of the brook began to slither upstream like a snake, dark muck birthing cracked rib bones pitted with tooth marks. Bubbling mire disgorged the broken end of a yellowing femur and a trail of metatarsals wriggled free of a willow tree's roots where it fed from the stream. A heavy old oak a few yards back shook off its blanket of toothy ivy, Elly's missing ulna fighting free of the tangled greenery.

The numbness in Harry's hands intensified, building to the point where he felt like he was swimming upriver against an arctic current, as if something had grabbed hold of all of his edges and tugged sideways.

It was then that he realized that the roar of water in his ears had very little to do with the physical world.

...and everything to do with the clinging chill of death tainting the ozone-spark of his magic, frigid water lapping at the shores of his mind.

Ice crackled in his lungs.

The world went grey.

* * *

Harry woke damp and cold, the smell of leaf-rot thick in his sinuses and throat. Rolling clouds the colour of soot sped across the sky above him, icy raindrops stinging the exposed skin of his face and hands.

"Stupid," said Elly, her frowning face appearing over him where she was crouched by his head. "You're supposed to put me back together, not tear yourself apart."

But over the lulling patter of rain on the ground, Harry could hear the skeleton's footsteps. Triumph flared inside him and Harry felt his lips peel back into a diamond-edged grin. "But I did put you back together," he said, voice as slow and deep as the cold river flowing through the back of his thoughts.

He rolled his head to face Elly, fingers still numb, the chill beginning to travel up his arms. "That was... easier than I remembered it being," he slurred, the words almost dredged out of him.

"That didn't look very easy," was Elly's mulish reply. For the ghost of a five-year-old, she had an uncomfortably deft grasp of sarcasm.

Harry didn't bother asking how long he was out, there were bigger things to worry about.

Like how he was going to bind Elly's bones to the alembic without a necromancer's bells, panpipes, or any other be-spelled instrument. He supposed he could just whistle the spells, but he had very little experience manipulating the finer aspects of necromancy with such an uncertain tool. Hell, he was already playing with shit well above his pay-grade. He hadn't realized it at the time, but the phantom waterway in the back of his mind wasn't in his head at all. What he was hearing was the dank rift of Death with a capital **D**.

Which was something he shouldn't have been able to do without years of experience or at least a solid education under a Master-class necromancer. Before coming back, Harry had been lucky to be able to craft a sturdy enough barrier to keep La Muerte's undead spies out.

And his knowledge was spotty at best – what little he knew was the result of cleaning up the necromancer's messes.

One of the most basic rules of magic was that like must counter like. Because La Muerte favoured the bells, Harry needed to know sound-based necromancy in order to counter his spells. He was nobody's idea of a musician, but he could carry a tune and hit the proper notes. Which was a good thing, because the ability to sing, hum, and whistle was the only thing that gave him an edge over La Muerte's nastier creations.

But it was also a bad thing, because it limited the ways he could approach this problem.

There were seven bells, and they sat with their clappers muffled in a bandolier slung crosswise over the shoulder. The bells didn't each have an individual _note_ on the musical scale, so much as each an individual _song_ for their purpose.

The first and smallest was Ranna, called the sleepbringer or 'Sleeper'; its low tones soothed the ear bringing silence to the restless and rest to the Dead. Harry had used Ranna often, whistling her sweet song while walking down a dark alley and banishing the revenants that crept along behind him.

Mosrael, the Waker, was a raucous bell with a harsh song that abraded the ears. La Muerte had once used the Waker to try and claim a pyrrhic victory, flinging both himself and Harry into Death. But Harry's will to live had proven stronger than the bell's power. The Waker had the ability to cast the listener into Death, while simultaneously bringing an army of the Lesser Dead into Life. He hadn't forgotten this bell's song, but Harry had never practised the note. Its sound was a dangerous balancing act, taking as much power from the wielder as it gave to the listener deep in Death.

The third was a contrary bell of several sounds, capable of making the wielder walk where he did not want to go. Kibeth was a obstinate bell. But Harry had long ago bent the Walker to his will, finding that the third bell's cantankerous nature was well-matched by his own stubborn personality. This bell gave freedom of movement back to the Dead. It could also force the Dead to walk where the wielder desired, further into Death or closer to Life.

Dyrim, the Speaker, had a melodious sound and could grant speech to the Dead who'd long forgotten how communicate in Life. The fourth bell was also capable of silencing a wagging tongue, but all of this was conjecture to Harry. He'd never heard the fourth bell and therefore could not mimic its song.

Belgaer was another slippery bell, which sought to sing clear of its own accord. Wily and troublesome, the Thinker could erase the minds of the listeners as easily as it could restore independent thought. It was another bell that Harry had never heard. Which was probably a good thing, because in an inexperienced hand this bell could also wipe clean the mind of its wielder.

The sixth bell held the strongest voice; deep and commanding, Saraneth was the Binder who shackled the Dead to the wielder's will. Harry knew this bell's song well and had used it often.

The last bell left Harry feeling cold at the mere thought of it. Astarael the Sorrowful. The seventh bell was the banisher, and properly rung it cast everyone who heard it too far into Death to ever return to Life. Everyone, including the ringer. Whistling was only a pale imitation of the bells' song, but Harry had no intentions of learning this bell's tune. He had never heard it and did not wish to.

Though only a necromancer could hear the bells' true song, their effects were felt by both the living and the Dead. In the hands of an experienced mage, the bells – and their songs – were a very dangerous tool.

He pushed himself up from his sprawl on the ground, a damp shiver running up his back as the fabric of his wet robes met the crisp snap of Autumn's chill. Elly's skeleton knelt beside the little ghost, head tilted at a thoughtful angle, hollow eye-sockets fixed on her spectral half.

Harry sighed.

Ghosts, even ones as strong as Elly, were nothing more than imprints – remnants of self, of magic, mimicking the personality they had once held in life. To truly bind Elly to _Life_, Harry needed to bring all of her back from Death. He may not have been able to give her a body, but he could give her power. He could give her the ability to manipulate her environment the way she would have if she had lived to grow into her own as a witch.

"We're almost done, Elly," Harry told the fidgety little ghost. "Just have one last thing to do. I'm going to draw a circle around us again and I need you to stay very still. Can you do that?"

Elly nodded, taking her skeleton's hand once more.

Entering Death was a lot easier than leaving it. Since Elly was already a ghost, the other part of her 'self' would be close to the barrier of Life. He'd never consciously travelled through Death, but apparently he was supposed to … _feel_ it and reach out to it. The echoing roar of dark water in his mind helped a bit. A vivid memory of green light hid behind the thundering rush of the river, but Harry stomped it down before it could form across his mind's eye.

He took a moment to marvel at how foolhardy an endeavour this was – to catapult himself into Death with his greatest weapon being the ability to whistle a happy tune.

Settling onto his knees inside another warding circle – this one drawn in the wet muck by the stream – Harry closed his eyes and reached out to the frigid river flowing through his psyche.

Cold pressure built into a wafer-thin crust of ice across his clothes. The gentle eddy of the disembodied river at his knees turned into a rapacious current that would drag him under if he faltered. Then there was the bright sting of icy meltwater against the sensitive skin of his face and Harry opened his eyes to a wide, shallow river. Tar-black and opaque, the chill waterway of Death stretched as far as the eye could see; its flat breadth met the distant grey horizon with nary a landmark to break up the monotony.

Little ripples marred the surface as the current drifted past Harry's shins, tugging the edge of his robes downstream. A patchy framework of grey-tinged frost crawled up the fabric, alarming him with how quickly it grew. Heavy as lead and stuck fast, the ice seemed almost sentient, leaving Harry with the shuddering impression that something _other_ was watching him.

Harry glanced up at the ashy sky above.

Nothing.

At his back, the heartbeat of Life bloomed warm and strong. It was hard to feel fear this close to that living heat and Harry felt reassured by how easy it would be to drop out of Death's cold domain.

One shuffling footstep forward told him that the river-bed was just as flat as its surface. There was no way of telling what kind of silt or other things he'd stirred up in the black water though, so Harry stopped moving as much as he could against the pull of the river.

He also didn't know who or what was listening so closely. Keeping his voice to a low hum, barely audible over the river, Harry spoke:

"_Elly_."

The water around him shuddered. There were odd whispering notes in his voice, an after-echo of sound that shouldn't have been there – a stone-throated rasp that reminded Harry of Grimaulkin's Daughter and her savage sub-vocal wrawl.

Kibeth's slippery song leapt to his lips, the whistle piercing Death's hushed realm. The river stilled, the current becoming as calm as a frozen mid-winter lake. Just under the river's placid surface, an incandescent glow the colour of old cobwebs raced towards Harry; it came from beyond the horizon, leaving a slow, viscous ripple in its wake.

Harry hoped this was Elly's spirit and not something else that had heard his call as he had neither bells nor spell-crafted sword to drive the thing back into Death. Wishing that he had at least brought his wakizashi, Harry whistled Saraneth's low, magisterial notes.

The glow trembled, stopping short of crashing against Harry's shins. Water splashed as a pair of tiny hands latched onto the front of his robes, pulling Elly – the real girl, not just her fading imprint – gasping and wild-eyed from the water, her ashy curls damp and dripping. Scooping her up into his arms, Harry made to back out of Death.

There was a dark smudge on the horizon.

Something else _had_ heard his call.

A howl split the air; broken-glass resonant and much closer than the tenebrous spot marring the sky appeared, it sounded as if it had been torn from the rotting jaws of a furious horde. Pounding pulsed in his ears, ghostly drumbeats of a long-dead army. The black river around him began to run backwards, like water draining off the sandy beach and back into the ocean's grasp. Beneath Harry's feet the riverbed shifted, slimy muck creeping up over the toes of his trainers.

Elly whimpered, burying her cold face in Harry's neck.

Stumbling back against the current of the river, Harry tightened his grip on Elly and flung himself and his precious cargo towards Life's warmth.

His knees hit the mud of the brook, striking little pebbles hidden in the soft earth. The sudden inversion from grey daylight to the black cover of night left Harry blind and disoriented. Light still radiated from the reliquary, but it was a pale star in the darkness.

"Elly!" he called, but her ghostly form was gone.

Harry inhaled, coughing a bit on how heavy and hot the air felt after the bone-chilling cold of Death. And if his voice still carried the strange susurrant reverberation from Death, he very carefully ignored it. "**ELLY!**"

No sign of either Elly's ghost or her skeleton.

On the other side of the brook was a crooked circle gouged into the spongy mire by the shore.

"_Oh shit_," Harry breathed. Somehow, just by taking a couple shuffling steps through the black water of the river, he'd moved almost fifteen feet away from where he'd entered Death.

Had he done it wrong? Harry knew fuck-all about necromancy beyond basic banishing spells – had he accidentally stranded Elly somewhere between Life and Death? Was that even possible?

His sight beginning to adjust to the darkness, Harry spun in a slow circle looking for Elly's telltale glow amongst the cluster of saplings along the edges of the brook.

Eyes stared straight back at him.

Harry jerked backwards, sucking in an involuntary breath of surprise.

Half-hidden beside a spindly young beech, the drab brown of Elly's dress and boots were almost indistinguishable from the damp autumn foliage. Limp and slicked to her skull, Elly's blond curls faded into the dull beige and grey bark of the trees. Her eyes shone impossibly pale, pupils flashing like a cat's in the faint light of the alembic.

Elly smiled, plum-dark mouth splitting too wide at the corners around straight, white teeth – perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary.

"Hi," she said, her voice bell-clear and sweet. Elly ducked her head, a soot-stain blush darkening her bone-white skin as she peered through damp, spiky lashes at him. "...thank you."

In the time it took to blink, Elly was across the brook and perched next to him on a deadfall of sun-bleached tree trunks near the water.

Harry swallowed, wondering what he'd unleashed on Life. Even as shallow a waterway as the stream running past them should have prevented her from crossing. Hell, how had she gotten across it in the first place?

Was it because Elly was bound to him and not a stationary location? Would it fade the further away she got from Harry, causing her to fall victim to the usual rules that bound the Dead?

Whatever Elly had become, it was not one of the Lesser Dead. If she suddenly belched flame and ate living flesh...

_'Fuck me running,'_ Harry thought. _'What am I doing? What if I made her into something that preys on people?'_

"Harry?" Elly's wistful face stared up at him as she reached out and tugged on his robes. "Are you angry? I didn't mean to. Really, I didn't."

Cautious and careful, Harry reached out and smoothed back the cold, damp silk of her curls. And instead of flinching away, Elly closed her eyes, sighed and leant into the touch. Something dark rubbed off onto his hands when he touched her, as if dirt or ash was smeared on her skin.

"No Elly," he murmured, not wanting to scare her again. "I'm not angry. You didn't do anything wrong."

The consequences of giving her such permanent power would be immense – both for himself and for those who would have to deal with Elly after he released her from her contract. But he hadn't known how to do this last time around. Otherwise, he'd have acquired the little ghost years ago.

Even without the extra power, Elly had always possessed an uncanny strength of will. It was unusual to see in a ghost not bound to wards or a servitude contract. Though with each of them having shed an equal amount of blood, he wasn't sure their arrangement even counted as a servitude contract.

"Elly," Harry made sure she was looking him in the eye before he said anything else, wanting her full attention. "I need you to do something for me. It's not very hard – I just need you to watch somebody for a bit and tell me what they do, okay?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Why?"

"Because he's a very bad man who has been hurting young girls." Harry held the little spook's unblinking stare. "He hurts them and then he kills them and their families never find out why they disappeared."

Something shifted in Elly's stare, a hollow light shining through the bones of her face. She tilted her chin up. "Okay," she whispered.

"Good girl," said Harry, pressing a kiss to the chill bone of Elly's forehead.

Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, Harry unfolded the corners and spread it out over his palm. Droplets of Bletchley's blood stained the white cotton from where Harry had hit the Death Eater, painstakingly collected from his knuckles during those tense moments he'd spent waiting in Dumbledore's antechamber.

He held it out to Elly. "Find him. Watch him. Tell me everything he does."

Her fingers closed over the scrap. The skin of her mouth was beginning to split, her teeth hanging over her lips like a lanternfish, brackish drool sliding down her chin. "May I play with him?" Elly asked as she stroked the stained cotton.

Her voice was just as sweet and lovely as before, but there was a subtle note running through it that reminded Harry of dried leaves crinkling underfoot.

Ten points to Elly for taking the initiative, Harry thought. "Yes, but only when he's alone. I don't think the others would understand."

Elly nodded, though her eagerness wilted a bit.

"I have to go now. But I'm counting on you to help me."

"I will," she said, her determined personality surfacing once more.

"Remember, I need him alive for this to work." Harry nodded to the eastern edge of the Forbidden Forest, away from the castle. "Go."

Elly smiled, a pale flicker of fire sparking in the back of her throat. And then she was gone. No lights, no after-image, just gone.

The reliquary dimmed to a mere glimmer of phosphorescence within the glass vial.

Harry looped the chain around his neck, tucking it inside his shirt. It was cold against his skin. Somewhere in the back of his psyche, the sound of dark water gurgled hungry and deep under an endless grey horizon.

Turning, Harry began the long trek back to the castle. Without the light of the alembic to guide him, the darkness pressed much closer. Off in the distance, Harry could hear the hunting cries of the Forbidden Forest's various night-dwelling predators. A chittering amongst the branches above him said that he had at least two of Hagrid's pet spiders following him, but the lingering chill of Death held them off.

Odd things happened when he used necromancy, but never had the after-effects lasted so long.

If he was going to use Elly as his eyes and ears, then he damn well needed to fix the gap in his knowledge. He'd gotten lucky – again. Hogwarts herself was heavily shielded and the Forbidden Forest was conductive to magic; the next time he played around with necromancy, Harry might not be so fortunate.

Harry didn't want to imagine what could have happened if he'd tried that next to an area like the Dead Zones; he might have been permanently stranded in Death, his physical body left behind like a victim of the Dementor's Kiss.

And he must have gotten turned around in the dark, because the forest thinned to reveal the open grounds of Hogwarts and her east-facing courtyards.

Much, much further away from the carriage house than he was expecting.

Nothing for it then.

Harry jogged up the winding stone walk, passing by Sprout's carefully tended gardens. The heavy downpour earlier had tamped down the ornamental grasses and delicate blooms; even the hardier plants had broken stems and other damage. Stepping around a puddle in the middle of the walkway where a small fish-pond had overflowed, he ducked through the side-door out of the misty rain.

Heat hit him in an almost physical wave.

Amber-orange flames burned merry and warm in brass sconces hanging overhead, the hall painfully bright to Harry's night-dilated pupils. Disoriented, he pressed a hand against the wall as he shuffled out of the doorway.

The hall split into a **Y**; one side dark, the other light. Regaining his balance, Harry took the hallway to the right, knowing the candlelit route would lead him back to Gryffindor Tower.

The corridor exited in an old solarium of sorts. During the day, sunlight would shine in from the tall windows and skylights lining the far side of the room. Now it was merely empty and dim.

From across the solarium came a cheerful drinking tune. The Fat Friar, drunk as he so frequently was when not around the students, was tone-deaf at best and clearly not paying attention to his surroundings. Tipsy and staggering, he meandered along the wall, sopping a great deal of wine onto the floor when he stopped to drink. Shinning puddles of ectoplasm littered the floor behind the friar, showing that this wasn't his first misstep.

Unthinking, Harry swerved around the portly ghost.

Who lurched to the side just in time to bump into Harry.

The Fat Friar's cup dropped to the ground with the clank of rough cast pewter.

Harry stumbled back, the ghost's cold weight enough to throw him off his stride.

The Fat Friar looked up from the wine spilt on his vestments with the sobering knowledge that something not quite right had just occurred.

Using necromancy made the intangible realm of phantasma something he could physically manipulate – all of it. Every ghost, ghoul and ghlim. If it was Dead, he could touch it.

Maybe the use of such powerful necromancy was still affecting his magic, causing these lingering side effects. Maybe he'd made his soul start to slip its bounds, begin sliding half-way into death. Maybe Elly had always been so powerful as to make herself into semi-solid matter that he had taken it for granted.

Whatever it was, Harry had fucked up.

Only the dead could touch the dead. Anything else was an aberration of the natural order of life.

Harry bent and picked up the cup. It was cool, but not cold. Lines of ghostlight shone through his fingers as he held it out to the wide-eyed ghost. "I'm sorry," he said hoping to dissipate the situation a bit. "Are you all right?"

Something in the Friar's face changed, his visage becoming remote as stone. He raised a hand towards Harry, palm glowing with the same power he'd once seen blast Death Eaters off the ramparts of the castle. The school ghosts could sense the touch of Death on him.

He'd activated Hogwarts' defences.

_Shit._

The words of necromancy didn't burn his tongue like before. No, this time they rolled free without a thought, Kibeth's song painting the air with an afterburn of sound. The Fat Friar's mouth dropped wide in a silent, bug-eyed wail before he fritzed out into a dark wisp of smoke that stank of ozone.

The ghost was gone.

"Well, fuck," Harry said, his voice echoing off the walls of the solarium.

Somehow, it felt as if Hogwarts herself stared back in silent accusation.

* * *

Warm, golden-green light shone through the pattern of stained-glass leaves on the lamp nestled into Hermione's secluded corner. Wedged in-between two tall bookshelves, her tiny wooden table overflowed with crumpled parchment and tilting piles of books. Above it hung a tapestry with a busy print of a wizarding hunt in gold, burgundy and forest greens – the clever eyes of a fox blinking at her from the brush before disappearing from the mute gallop of horses' hooves and the silent baying of the hounds.

The Library was quiet this late in the evening; most of Hogwarts' inhabitants had finished their studies for the day and were enjoying dinner in the Great Hall. Stilling her hands from plucking at the loose threads of her skirt, Hermione picked up the crinkled bit of parchment that had once been an origami frog.

Pink glitter shone off the scrap of parchment, Lavender's latest bit of gossip scrawled in enchanted wizarding ink. Hermione never really paid attention to rumour and idle speculation, but this...

This seemed _real_ in a way that the silly gossip about who dated who rarely did.

Harry had gotten into a scuffle with a Slytherin upper year and it wasn't the older student who had come out on top.

Hermione folded her hands and pressed them against the sharp ache beneath her breastbone. Nervous energy caused her legs start bouncing where they were pressed together, ankle-to-ankle under the table, her spine ramrod straight despite the comfortable tweed cushions of the chair. She remembered what Harry was like the last time she'd talked to him.

Not the easy, gregarious joking that he'd adopted over the summer, but their conversation in the abandoned classroom on the second floor. How cold and wrong Harry had felt to her just after the dementors, wearing the face of her friend, but none of his familiarity.

And nobody, it seemed, had seen either boy since the incident in question. Each hour that passed by without any sign of her friend had twisted the pinched knot of tension in her stomach tighter and tighter with worry.

Hermione shoved a tall stack of books on the desk aside, the Library's innate magic picking up the discarded pile and whisking it away before it could topple to the floor.

She'd long since concluded that the pale-haired, green-eyed woman that had appeared in the classroom was not a manifestation of the boggart. But nothing Hermione had read came close to fitting the woman. Veela seemed similar – appearance-wise at least – until she realized that they were creatures of fire. The lovely Wight that had interrupted the lesson was very obviously a being of ice and snow, the air of the classroom plunging into wintry temperatures, frost beginning to crawl up the windows.

But looking up Winterfell beasts and their kin had led her off into old wives' tales and horror stories; fairy tales told in metaphor and simile, rather than records documenting any sort of hard knowledge.

"Er, Hermione?"

Startled, she flinched in her chair. The book in her hands nearly tumbled from her grasp, a small puddle of black spreading from the tipped-over inkwell.

Colin blinked, brown eyes large and docile. "I thought you ought to know it's almost curfew," he said while tugging the strap of his Muggle backpack over his skinny shoulder, his ever-present camera already looped around his neck. "We'll be late if we don't leave now."

Hermione froze, her free hand outstretched over the leaking inkwell. "I – yes, of course. I'm..." She righted the inkstand and swished her wand over the whole mess, books flying off to their proper shelves, black ink rolling off the wood and back into its tray. "I'm ready," she declared in as steady a voice as she could mange.

Colin bobbed his head. "All right then."

Grabbing her bag, Hermione shifted the heavy tomes inside so they wouldn't poke her in the hip. The stairs were murder to climb without being jabbed in the side as well.

Why wouldn't Harry tell her what was going so wrong inside his head – what had him coiled so tight inside himself that he would had to vent his ire through violence rather than through more productive outlets? Wasn't that what Quidditch was supposed to be? A logical avenue to physically work out his frustrations?

But Harry hadn't had any interest in Quidditch or flying this year. In fact, he hadn't shown much interest in _anything_ outside of attending class and working on a few half-hearted essays.

Harry had never been very social, but she keenly felt the absence of his dry wit and mellow disposition. This new creature with the gregarious personality couldn't be more stilted if he tried. It was like he was trying to put up a front of being okay, but didn't know the part he was playing well enough to be convincing.

Hermione grimaced, swinging her bag over her other shoulder to relieve the added weight biting into her collarbone.

Didn't he know they were all better off together instead of fighting off monsters by themselves?

She wasn't a fool. Hermione knew that there wasn't some miracle spell that would make him trust easier, make Harry want to confide in her. But hadn't she always been there? Hadn't she proved herself by following him into danger, heedless of warnings otherwise? He'd saved her and the school twice over now. Was it really so wrong to want to repay his selfless courage?

Just this once, why couldn't she slay his dragons for him?

Colin held the portrait door for her as she clambered through. "Thank you!" she gasped, still puffing a bit from the mad dash up the stairs.

Shrugging in reply, the blond second year disappeared into the unusually crowded common room.

Despite being so full, the common room was caught in a hush. Huddled clumps of students murmured in low, vehement tones; every time someone started to get loud, they found themselves under the collective scrutiny of the Gryffindor hoi polloi.

Hermione was starting to getting the uncomfortable feeling she had been in this same position last year, during the parseltongue debacle.

She shouldered her way through the press of students to the overstuffed armchairs by the fire. Her lanky red-headed friend sat cross-legged and hunched over, hands tucked into the pockets of his worn Chudley Cannons jumper.

"No sign?" she asked, dropping her books beside the armchair opposite Ron's.

He shook his head, firelight gleaming amber-orange on the long mop of hair poking out from his hood. "Not since class." Ron snorted, sharing a knowing look with her. "And we all know how well _that_ ended."

"Nothing at all?" Hermione persisted, feeling desperate.

Ron lifted his shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, going back to contemplating his shoelaces. "Katie Bell was one of the last to see him, I think. Said that she saw Snape drag him off to Dumbledore's office."

Hermione pulled her fingers away from her mouth before she could start chewing on her nails. "Oh no! How much trouble do you think he's in?"

A new voice interjected itself into the conversation.

"A lot." Fred's grim countenance appeared over his brother's chair. "Whenever Wood's gotten in a tussle with Flint, he's always been handed off to McGonagall – Never much had a reason to be sent to the Headmaster."

George slung an arm around Ron's shoulder. "'Course, that's probably because Wood's never tried to yank Flint's brain out via his nostrils." He ruffled Ron's hair. "Feet off the chair, little brother. BigHead Boy's on a warpath tonight."

Flint's _brain_?

"What happened?" Hermione breathed, aghast.

"Rumour and hearsay," replied Fred in a dark voice, stormy expression building into a full-on scowl. "_That's_ what happened."

George nudged his twin with an elbow. "We know that Bletchley threw the first curse and that's about it."

Fred snorted. "Lobotomy Lollipops: Buy one, Get one free."

Hermione tipped her head to the side, struggling to place the name. "Bletchley? I'm afraid I don't know him."

"_Good._" Wood dropped to one knee beside the fireplace chairs, bracing a forearm across his thigh. "Keep it that way. Bletchley is the twisted sort who needs very little provocation to attack another student." His mouth thinned into a mere slash of an expression. "If it weren't for his family and their money, I wouldn't be surprised to see his name come up in a murder case after he leaves Hogwarts."

Ron gaped at the Quidditch captain. "_Mur_ – "

Wood cut him off. "Yes. I'm not much fond of talking behind people's backs, but you all need to be aware and stay safe."

_Funny_, she thought as her hands began to shake, _how easily that could also describe Ha –_

There was a little voice in the back of her mind saying, _'It's not him, it's not him, it's not him, it's not Harry, they took him and left _this_ in his place.'_

She straightened in her chair, shaking off that moment of oddness. Too many fairy tales and not enough dinner. Strange things were bound to happen.

"What should we do?" Hermione asked, folding her hands together.

"Keep an eye on the younger years," said Wood as he inclined his head at the tiny first and second years watching the tableau from the edges of the room. "The upper years intimidate them, but you're one of them. Or close to it at least. They'll be more likely to talk to you than – "

The portrait door swung open.

Harry slithered through the entrance to Gryffindor tower.

Conversation in the common room cut off so abruptly, Hermione swore she felt her ears pop.

Something was very, _very_ wrong.

Soaked to the bone, his hair tangled with leaves and still seeping water down his face, Harry didn't seem to notice them at first. There was something wild lurking in his visage, green eyes heavy-lidded and feverish in his milk-pale face. Frost flaked off the sopping cotton of his robes and melted into the carpet as he glided through the room, the crowd edging away from the sharp chill coming off him. It was like something had fashioned itself a body from the debris of the Forbidden Forest and put Harry's face on like a carnival mask.

Hermione wondered whose bright idea it was to let this thing loose in Hogwarts.

"Harry Potter!" Percy barked, his voice ringing through the silent common room.

Harry paused. He rolled his head to the side and stared over his shoulder with one malefic green eye. Not even a flicker of recognition. The whole movement was so sinuous that it seemed like he'd forgotten how to move in human ways, his bones no longer lining up where they should be.

"Where were you?" the Head Boy demanded. "McGonagall wants to see you in her office."

Harry smiled. There was a damp smear of dirt over the corner of his jaw, a dark contrast to the white flash of his teeth.

Sliding his hands into his pockets, Harry shifted to face the older Weasley, that sly smile never wavering. "Out," he replied, his voice a low, honeyed croon. "It was such a beautiful evening; thought I'd take a walk and enjoy it."

Percy swayed back on his feet for a moment, eyes going unfocused. But then he straightened, his obstinate temperament shaking off whatever strange spell Harry's voice had woven. "You're lying," Percy stated flatly.

"Am I?" said Harry. His clear amusement aggravated the Head Boy, who obviously had no idea how to deal with Harry's brazen disregard.

"I don't appreciate you telling stories when half the school's resources are tied up in keeping you safe," replied Percy.

Harry laughed.

Hermione gritted her teeth, cringing away from the sound. A secondary echo resonated underneath his false cheer and the harsh sibilance felt like sandpaper against her eardrums. It was a sound that should never have been made with a human throat.

She wasn't the only one who could hear it. Others in the common room had recoiled from the strange vocals in Harry's laugh.

"Goodness, Perce, how would you know if I'm telling stories? I haven't seen you around at _all_. It's almost as if you weren't even looking for me."

Percy's nostrils flared with anger. "You disappeared for half the day after you started a fight with an upper year. What am I supposed to think?"

"That I know the secret passages of this school better than you do, and I didn't want to be found?" Harry replied, making the mocking statement into a prod at Percy's intelligence.

The Head Boy grimaced, trying for another tactic. "We're doing this for your benefit – "

"Bullshit," Harry drawled, the word coming out half-slurred with laughter. This time there was no echo. Just Harry and a laugh that sounded as if it had been scraped up off the bottom of the ocean floor.

"Ten points from Gryffindor!" Percy snapped. "Don't ever use that kind of –"

He continued on over Percy's indignant rant. "I know for a fact you're only doing this to kiss the right asses. You never lifted a finger to look for me – you didn't even know I was missing until you got out of class, which..."

Harry made a show of looking at a non-existent watch. "...was about an hour ago. I – "

"I was pulled out of class three hours ago to help look for you," said Percy, real anger beginning to spark in his expression, his voice nearly shaking with emotion. "As was Wood and most of the other seventh year Gryffindors. The least you could do is get rid of your foul attitude."

"Oh Percy! You and your _noble_ suffering on my behalf," Harry said with a derisive smile. "Don't make yourself out to be a fucking martyr here. You don't actually care about me – you're only doing this to prop yourself up for recognition. Because really, it's not like you've got anything else going for you."

"Twenty points from Gryffindor," Percy grit out, face almost as red as his hair.

"Head Boy? Pshh." Harry waved a dismissive hand. "You were last pick on the candidate list for a job nobody wanted. Dumbledore never liked the idea of you as Head Boy; said you were too rigid, too _prideful_ to know your own limitations – to realize that you haven't the first fucking clue about being a leader. And let's be honest, Dumbledore's right."

Wood stood up. "That's enough," he said, the command ringing out over the common room.

"This?" Harry spread his arms and gestured to the common room at large. "_This is the shit hitting the fan!_ And you? Smack dab in the middle of all this? You have _no_ idea what you're doing. You're just a cog in the machine playing at being one of the big boys," said Harry, lip curling with disgust. "Some days? You wish you'd never accepted that badge. Hell, if Ollie hadn't turned down Dumbledore's offer, you wouldn't even have been in the running."

"Enough!" The Quidditch captain yelled as he pushed through the crowd of students.

Harry didn't even look at him. "How's it feel, Perce? To have won by default? To know everything you value so dearly is little better than an accident of happenstance?"

This was all wrong.

"I promise you," said Harry, voice ringing clear throughout the common room. "One day that pride of yours will trip you up so badly you'll betray your family for a cause you don't even believe in." He leaned forward, almost nose to nose with Percy's shell-shocked countenance. "Because you couldn't admit you were _wrong_. You'll destroy your own life – _just to save face_. What's worse? You'll damage the lives of everyone around you as well."

Harry leaned back on his heels and stuck his hands in his pockets. "I have to say, as far as self-destructive behaviour goes? That's nigh fucking talented of you, Perce."

"Harry stop!"

Oliver Wood forced his way in between the two, raising a hand when Percy opened his mouth to protest.

"Stop," Oliver repeated to Harry, soft enough that Hermione struggled to hear him. "Before you do something you regret."

"No, I really don't think I'm regretting any of this," said Harry, not bothering to modulate his reply.

"Harry," Oliver began.

"Ollie – "

Wood's lips had gone white with anger around the edges. "I would hate to have to suspend you from the team for fighting – "

"I'm not fighting," Harry drawled, unrepentant and dismissive.

The lie fell so easily from his mouth, Hermione knew he believed it to be true.

"And I'm supposed to believe that with what you just said and the way you're acting? This is the second fight today."

All traces of amusement left Harry's face. "I didn't start that."

Wood looked skeptical. "I want to believe you, but I'm having a hard time – "

"_He attacked me! End of story!_" Harry snarled in voice that rattled the windows.

"Go to bed, Harry," said Wood, shaking his head. "I'll speak with you in a moment."

An unfamiliar sneer crossed Harry's face. "What?"

"Go to bed."

"Why?" Harry asked incredulously. "How am I wrong? Just because he's too much of a bumbling idiot to figure out the obvious – "

Even Oliver Wood's patience had a stalling point. "Harry! Obvious or not, your behaviour is not accep – "

Harry threw his head back and laughed, interrupting his captain. "I note you're not contradicting me. No wonder nobody listens to him. Even you don't respect him."

"Listen to me!" Wood shouted. "I _get_ that you're going through something. I _get_ that you're angry about the dementors. I _get_ that you've got a massive chip on your shoulder about Black betraying your parents. But that doesn't mean _you_ get to take it out on everyone else!"

Harry's smirk got wider and wider as Wood talked until it was a full on grin again. "Not a bad guess," said Harry, voice filled with idle amusement. "_Close_, but no cigar."

Strain began to appear on Wood's face. "Which is why I'm suspending you for the next game. This is too many fights in one day. Do you even realize what you're doing?"

Shrugging, Harry spread his hands wide and stared back at his captain, insolence writ in every gesture. "And I care, why?"

"I'm also confiscating your broom," Wood said in lieu of an actual reply.

There was a distinct lack of concern on Harry's face. "No."

"That wasn't me asking, Harry."

"Actually, you can't," Harry said with a smile, schoolboy bright and fake.. "See, I own my broom outright, I'm not borrowing it from the school. McGonagall can_ ground_ me, preventing me from using the Pitch. But you can't actually_ confiscate_ my broom – it's private property."

Wood nodded as if coming to some internal decision. "Make that two games you're suspended from."

"Harry, please," begged Alicia, standing near Oliver's side. "Don't make it worse for yourself."

Harry's smile changed, something cold and hard entering his expression. "Why don't you make it all of them, Ollie?"

"What?" Oliver blinked as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. "Are you – ?"

"Find a replacement Seeker while you're at it," added Harry, his tone almost absent of inflection.

Wood looked like he'd just been blindsided. "Harry, will this really fix – "

"This was your doing, Ollie." Harry held his hands up. "I'm done here."

In a whirl of damp robes, Harry turned to push his way through the crowd of students, who didn't so much fall back as ooze away in surprise and shock at what they'd witnessed.

And suddenly, Hermione wasn't the only one who could see that something was terribly wrong with Harry. Looking at Wood's devastated face, she knew she wasn't the only one who had no idea what to do.

Hermione was just gathering her courage to go talk to Harry when Snape stormed through the portrait entrance.

* * *

Rain trickled over the windows in the third year boys' dormitory. And despite the darkness beyond, ambient light washed kaleidoscope patterns across the wooden floor of the tower.

Mess accumulated around the beds, each boy collecting their own personal orbit of junk. Severus stepped over a pile of dirty laundry the house elves had yet to collect. Pictures of family, team banners, trinkets of little worth and other personal talismans were piled up on bedside tables and spread across walls. Clothes spilled out of wardrobes. Parchment and books sat in crumpled heaps inside open trunks. It seemed that the Gryffindor third years had turned their allotted share of space into a microcosm of themselves.

There was a bed under the far window that didn't fit this profile.

Military neat with sharp corners and sheets pulled tight enough to bounce a coin on, Potter's bed and surrounding space held no signs of his personality.

Potter's wardrobe was open.

Potter's wardrobe was also empty.

A clean birdcage rested on the floor next to the trunk. A polished Nimbus 2000 leaned against the bed frame. A photo album and a letter lay on top of the trunk.

Picking up the album, Severus flipped open the cover. Though the rest of the pages were quite full, the front folio was missing its picture. _James, Lily and baby Harry_ read the hand-written caption underneath.

The cover of the letter was blank. But inside the painstakingly folded parchment was the headmaster's name written in a mature hand, the half-cursive letters fluid and well-formed. There was but one line written underneath it.

_Thank you._

Flipping open the trunk, Severus found where Potter's school robes and clothes had disappeared.

And atop of the folded garments sat a pair of spectacles and a holly wand.


	22. C'est la vie

**Disclaimer:** Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you're skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.

**A/N:** Thanks goes to jpdt19 and wolve for freely offering their help and insight into the London area. Cheers, your assistance is invaluable. Yes, I know it's a short chapter. You'll live.

Chapter Twenty-one

_C'est la vie_.

Such is life.

White noise settled into a low-level buzz through Harry's mind. It was like somebody had tried turning the radio on, but the only channels coming through were full of static and half-garbled messages.

His hands worked by memory, tugging the polishing cloth through the dismantled barrel of the Beretta. The stringent smell of gun oil wafted up from the gleaming pieces of the weapon strewn out across the table.

The safe house was located on the outskirts of the docklands. Back from the glitzy new redevelopments along the front, the old still lingered; a temporary drop spot where he could hole up and disappear when things got too tense.

Harry placed the barrel down on the drop cloth and reached for the next item in line. A knife appeared in his hands this time and he flipped the cloth to a dry side before inspecting the blade's edge for nicks.

_Don't think, don't think anything at all. Don't think, just do. Don't give yourself enough time to look back and regret._

No amount of clinging to the past would make the future any better.

His pulse beat steady and slow in his ears. Like a clock, tick-tick-ticking down to the end.

Without his baby-faced Glamour, Harry Potter – the real Harry Potter – stared back at him from the polished steel of the blade. It was the boggart's twin, hollow-cheeked and hungry; bruised smudges under the eyes from lack of sleep.

Objectively, Harry knew his sixteen-year-old self had started this with moral righteousness on his side. But somewhere along the way that moral objective had gotten warped, his view of the world no longer lining up in neat, well-ordered rows. And now that he was close enough to see where he'd made his biggest mistakes, the more he realized just how futile his efforts were, fuck ups, fix-ups and all.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave," Harry murmured to himself. "When first we practice to deceive."

* * *

Blackwood panted like an angry bull, fists planted knuckle-down on Shorner's desk, the thick muscle of his shoulders bunched tight and straining against the crisp cut of his robes.

"If you cannot control your agent – " Blackwood bit out.

Shorner stared back, expression bland and impassive. "Self-defence is not a crime," he replied, folding his hands atop the pile of paperwork in front of him. "Morticus Calloway used lethal magic, my agent did not. Hadrian Sharr is neither guilty of culpable manslaughter nor any flavour of reckless endangerment."

"The Auror was unacceptable collateral damage." Blackwood straightened, rubbing the heel of his hand over his temple. "Now, half of the DMLE is poking their collective noses in places better left alone."

"My agent tried to avoid such an occurrence by manipulating the dispute into an abandoned building," Shorner rejoined, keeping his voice smooth and even and free of his rising frustration. "Calloway, on the other hand, repeatedly cast the Killing Curse as well as the hex that killed Auror Hartken."

There was a rush of voices through the half-open door, one of the many committee meetings of Experimental Magic letting a flood of employees out into the corridor. From the jubilant sound of the technicians' conversation, someone had gotten the go ahead on their project.

The left-over silence when they passed rang out all the more clearly against the memory of voices.

"This is not about _my_ agent, Shorner," Blackwood murmured, the shapes of his words thin and strained from the tension in his face.

Shoner's eyebrows rose in an expression of surprise. He wanted to say it was genuine, but he was beginning to get the impression that Blackwood was merely going through the motions to cover his own arse. It seemed as if the Head of Mission Operatives was reading his lines from a script and nobody had bothered to share a copy with Shorner.

"Really," he replied, unable to keep the barbed edge of sardonic disbelief from his voice. "A rogue operative from your division went after one of mine with the intent to kill. If we weren't working under such shady circumstances already, this incident would be enough to put your whole department under investigation. Murdering a fellow agent – especially a superior in the chain of command – isn't just homicide, it's one step away from treason. The fact that Calloway failed doesn't diminish the severity of the situation."

Blackwood dipped his head in a semblance of a nod, dark eyes wary now that Shorner showed no signs of playing his game. "Calloway's actions were not sanctioned by myself. Nor by any other member of my staff. I am prepared to vouch for them if at all necessary."

_I am prepared to put my career on the line_.

Shorner's rebuttal dried up, the words too heavy with the weight of reality for mockery or mirth. "Then I'd wager that your problem is about to get a whole lot bigger than Calloway's mess," he replied.

The _' - if you cannot control your agents'_ went unsaid, but the quick tightening of Blackwood's jaw showed that he'd heard it loud and clear.

"I am not your subordinate, Connor," Shorner continued, his words low and serious as he refocused his attention on his paperwork, the unfinished letter to Harry hidden underneath the pile. "I think you forget that at times."

It took almost an hour after Blackwood left for Shorner to feel safe enough to tug Harry's letter from hiding.

Brief and pointed, the message to Shorner's wayward agent contained only one line of importance through the tangle of code blathering on about the banalities of paperwork:

_See me at your earliest possible convenience._

* * *

Sirius curled his toes in the dry grass near the steps. Small white flowers dotted the overgrown fields surrounding the villa. This close to the ocean, the air was still balmy and summer-warm.

The old Black château along the Mediterranean coast of France had been abandoned for so long that the garden had grown into the house. Brilliant shards of stained glass were wound tight with variegated ivy, a thick carpet of moss growing over the stonework. Part of the entry hall ceiling had fallen through; the heavy branches of what was once a potted house-plant reaching up towards the sky, roots cracking great slabs of the marble floor and sinking deep into the earth.

It was easy to forget how much freedom meant until you had none at all.

After he'd escaped, even the smallest stimuli sent his senses into overload. Colours too bright, sounds harsh and loud. Even the air felt like too much, too different from the damp, salty chill of Azkaban. Sirius found himself missing the sameness of each day repeating itself in a never-ending monotony of grey – if only for the safety of knowing that each day would be the same as the last, never having to guess what might come next. He'd forgotten how to function in a world outside of a small cell and two meals a day, dementor-induced madness prowling along the edges of his subconscious as it searched for a way in.

Being around Harry was like those first few days out of the gloom.

_Overwhelming._

There was a moment of guilt-induced shame. Here he was _lying_ to Harry, telling him that he was... what? Proud of him? That he loved him? That he wanted to be family to him? That Harry embodied everything the Black Legacy held proud? Everything that Sirius had run from at sixteen?

Sirius knew he had handed too much of his own autonomy over to a boy who wasn't even old enough to shave, but what other options did he have? Pettigrew was gone, run off by Harry or threats similar. The UK was undergoing an almost _literal_ witch-hunt and his picture circling the Muggle world made it nearly as dangerous. Even apparation was out of question – the paper-pushers at the ministry now able to track signatures from beginning to end. Somehow, when he wasn't looking, technology had advanced to the point where it made anonymity a fever-dream at best.

And yet... Despite all of this...Harry still managed to gallivant around the globe with what was apparently no-one the wiser.

"Knock knock!" a voice bellowed as if summoned by his thoughts, the sound crossing through the covered gardens to the half-ruined wreck of a house. The tall, lanky figure coalesced into his godson, a knapsack slung over his shoulder and a pair of battered old aviators hiding the green hue of his irises.

_'You know well the power of names,'_ whispered the shadow in his mind. Now the sunlight seemed painful, too bright, too hard, the heat cloying and clinging to each breath. Sweat prickled at his skin.

It had been, what...? Barely a _week_ since school started? More than that, how the hell had he found this place? Harry was lucky the wards hadn't cooked him from the inside out the moment he set foot on the grounds.

"Harry?" asked Sirius, voice gritty from disuse. "Why aren't you at Hogwarts?"

His godson looked down, scuffing the toe of his boot through the loose, dusty earth where a paving stone was missing. "Yeah, about that." Harry exhaled, tilting his head back to stare at the sky before cracking his neck from side to side.

There was a thin sheen of sweat near his hairline.

"Things have gotten a bit complicated."

* * *

_This time, there is no music. No catchy tune, no handy jingle, no hallowed hymn to hold him through the hour. _

_Objectively, he knows he's not here, knows that his body is safe and asleep in Sirius' crumbling château by the sea. Knows that if he reaches out, his fingers would touch the soft cotton of his blankets spread out over the low couch in the green room; glass ceiling panes still holding strong despite the years. Knows that if he opened his eyes, he'd see starlight – impressionist fireflies through the cloudy glaze of the windowpanes._

_Draco hitches the legs of his trousers up as he settles onto the bench beside him. The _scritch-grit_ of __debris__ beneath his shoes is echo-loud in the silence. _

_The world burns around them. _

_Less than a hundred meters away, the steel frame of a building bends in the heat haze; its crown bowing down to touch the ground, hellfire licking at the rubble. Burning paper falls like ash from the sky. Sparks sear holes in his BDUs and streak Harry's arms with soot. _

_He rubs at the dirty residue on his skin, black staining the joins of his fingers. "Can a tiger change his stripes?" he asks no-one in particular._

_Draco laughs. His eyes are puffy and raw, as if from tears or the burning ash choking out the air."I doubt it," he drawls, draping an arm across the back of the bench. "But then, I've never seen you try."_

_Harry doesn't know what he means by that. Truth be told, that's more due to wilful obliviousness than actual ignorance. _

_He knows he's heard this refrain before._

_At the base of the bench where they've carefully avoided stepping, avoided looking, lies__ Lorraine's body twisted underneath scraps of rebar and brick, her golden curls tangled with window glass like diamonds in the sun. The bus stop signpost glows a lurid orange, heat waves rippling through the smoke. The blackened metal skeleton of the bus lingers by the curb. If a broken clock is right two times a day, then the bus is on schedule at least twice that._

_They're going nowhere fast._

_Draco sits there in his white, white suit, lounging on the bench like they were having drinks at some seaside spa and resort – not jawing around over the body of Harry's dead girlfriend. Harry smooths out the imaginary wrinkles on his blood-spattered black fatigues, self-concious for the first time in ages. Even in death, Draco was moving up while he was moving down. It's one of those moments in life that's swollen with words too confusing, too conflicting to manipulate into coherent sentences._

_'What am I doing?' he wants to ask. As if the man had a magic 8-ball hidden in his fancy suit and all the easy answers contained within._

_Harry opens his mouth._

_Closes it._

_Looks away._

Coward.

_Cars sit in the intersection, piled haphazard over each other like a toddler's building blocks. A tiny punched-in Fiat burns at the stop light, rubber tires sending out a melted stink. B__right flares sear after-images of green and blue into Harry's vision._

_Soon, all of this will be ash. It'll be another year before the Thames floods through here, packing in a layer of garbage and mud over the sooty debris. _

"_I feel like I'm grave-robbing the lives of the living to give back to the dead," says Harry, wiping the sweat from his face._

_Bitterness dances around the edges of Draco's laugh. "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" Draco murmurs. His lip curls, pity and anger self-evident. And if Harry didn't know better, he'd say Draco was watching him with the same sick fascination as he would watch someone suicidal jump onto the train tracks, lights racing toward them._

_The metal stairs from the flat behind them crash down, neon-edged sparks lighting upon Harry's skin. That little alleyway nearby is going to go up in flames. And all the air is going to be sucked from this place, crumbling, graffiti-marked concrete blasting outwards like shrapnel from a grenade. _

_The fires are coming closer._

_And he'd seen Lorraine in the common room; seen her dismay – her fear – an__d knew it was directed at himself._

_Why hadn't he thought of her? It was as if he'd hurt too much to try and wrap his mind around her presence. Easier then, to continue thinking of her as dead than to face up to the reality that he couldn't ever have her again. Because the person here wasn't the woman he'd fallen in love with and he wasn't the man she'd cared for and grown to love. _

_Or maybe he'd never loved her at all. Maybe... Maybe he'd loved the idea of her more than he'd loved the actual person. _

_A scrap of dark silk slithers free from around his neck. The banner of the Sharr House pools in his lap, stark against the worn weave of his BDUs. __Winding the silk about his fingers, Harry stared into the white eyes of a rearing thestral with curling black ram's horns. _

"_I never did," Harry replies._

_She burns._


End file.
